Close Encounters 15
by chezchuckles
Summary: Never Say Never Again. Castle flies Beckett to the heart of the Congo to track down his father and hopefully acquire the missing elements of the regimen.
1. Chapter 1

**Close Encounters 15: Never Say Never Again**

* * *

Castle hunched over the instrument panel and checked their altitude once more, scanning his line of sight with a furrow in his brow.

They'd tracked Black to coordinates deep in the heart of some of the most dense, inhospitable Congo, and now he had to land a fucking plane in the middle of it and _hike in_ to whatever unknown situation his damn father was concocting.

He could punch a hole in the damn instrument panel, he was so furious, but he'd done it to himself. To them. What could he do? She was going to be in this plane with or without him, and like hell he was going to let her go off on her own. More than that, it was his own stubborn denial that had pushed her out here in the first place, and he owed it to her now to follow this through.

"Castle?"

"Yeah. I'm looking," he growled.

"You gonna be pissed off with me for the rest of our time here?"

"You mean, on this earth? I hope to hell not. But at the rate we're going, Beckett, might be true. You have a fucking awesome sense of direction. It's too bad your true north is mortal peril."

"You're pretty melodramatic when you're pissed."

"I'm not pissed," he growled again, twisting his head to look at her. "I'm fucking scared. You scared the shit out of me and I'm _still_ scared."

She closed her mouth and he saw her whole body yearning for him, but he turned his face from her and went back to the controls. If she touched him right now... he had no idea what he'd do. Not like he'd ever really break her, but Beckett liked damage, Beckett craved it on a level that Castle sometimes didn't have control over. And she'd take it from him - she'd take it and give it back and he was afraid that he craved it too.

_Punish me._

Fuck, no. After his father's mistreatment, the bruises on her face and the beatings, punishment was the last thing he wanted to give her. Besides, punishment wasn't punishment if she _wanted_ it. And he wasn't prepared for the forgetting that was involved in that kind of... connection.

Shit. Connection. That was all she wanted from him. He knew that; he knew that was how she worked, how she reassured her heart.

Castle swallowed and glanced over at her in the co-pilot seat, the way she hid her face behind her hair and studied the instruments like she knew what she was doing. His chest was too tight, as it had been when he couldn't catch a deep breath, couldn't breathe at all, and the fact that he was healthy enough now to commandeer a plane and take on a coterie of mercenaries was due to her.

"Kate."

Her shoulders hunched but she turned to look at him, hesitance in her lines.

He didn't have the words she needed, not right now, but he had the connection she craved more than even the punishment. Castle reached out and laid his hand over her forearm, lightly, lightly, and traced the soft skin down to the inside of her wrist. She trembled but turned her hand, palm up, seeking his.

He didn't lace their fingers together, he couldn't yet, but he cradled her hand with his own, skimming the softness of her life line with his thumb. Gentle, gentle. He made himself be gentle.

_Fastest way to break her her._

He sighed. He didn't really want to break her.

"Rick."

"Find me a place to land, Kate."

He let her go and turned back to the business of setting them down.

* * *

Beckett held her breath as Castle brought the Cessna Citation 525 towards the earth. The cockpit was filled with instruments and digital displays, such a cramped contingency of data being pushed out that she had no idea where to even begin.

Castle had no problem looking right at home in the pilot's seat. The white padded chairs seemed contoured perfectly for his legs, and the yoke was in his steady hands. His eyes scanned the instruments, his concentration unshakeable, and the narrow stretch of still-smoldering rain forest was coming at them fast.

The blackened earth below them had undergone the slash and burn method of farming, and while not ecologically sustainable, she was grateful for whatever farmer had done it, because it provided them the only chance at landing the Cessna.

If Castle wasn't mad at her, he'd be explaining everything as they went along, asking her to read instruments or tell him what a display said, giving her instructions and maybe letting her try flying the Cessna. He was naturally talkative; he was the one who offered himself up in their relationship, and it was strange to subsist now in this quiet.

But she'd do it. She owed it to him, to give him that chance to let the anger settle out. She hoped it settled out.

"Beckett," he said. "Safety harness."

"I'm belted in," she promised, glancing back to him.

He flicked his eyes to her with a grimace that seemed aimed at himself. "Good girl. But I was talking about mine. Lean over, baby."

She did, reaching awkwardly for the two sides of the harness belt, trying to push them together over his chest. Her palms were sweating at the natural heat of him - a regimen-induced heat, she thought - but he didn't afford her a second glance.

She'd rather he keep his eyes on the horizon anyway.

She clicked his harness into place and sank back into her own seat, wondered if she-

"Hands on the control wheel," he said shortly. "When I say, I need you to pull back on the yoke with me so we can flare up for landing."

"Okay," she said, wrapping her fingers around the two handles on the Y-shaped control wheel. Yoke, he'd called it. He had his right hand on the black throttle between them, waiting on her. She nodded. "Okay, I got it."

He was gauging their descent, his eyes fiercely blue, studying weaknesses like a predator. Kate glanced out the front window towards the oncoming land and shivered.

"Now," he clipped.

She gasped at the _force_ of it, the resistance she felt as she pulled back, but she could also see the slashed rainforest hurtling towards them at a speed that seemed insurmountable. She gritted her teeth, intent on not letting him down, and the Cessna seemed to shudder around them like a reined beast.

She sucked in a breath, unable to help the thrill that went through her, her heart wild in time to the racing earth. The Cessna touched down with a jolt, the thick trees were flashing by on either side, and the plane seemed to scream forward even as Castle applied the brakes and kept a hand on the throttle.

"Enough," he growled. "Let go."

She did, her body thumping in time to the pulse of the whining engines, and she stared ahead at the fast approaching trees. They were running out of landing strip.

The Cessna bumped and jerked over the uneven ground, the wind fierce around the monoplane, and the trees were rushing towards them.

She tasted the thrill in the back of her throat, and instead of keeping her eyes on the trees, she turned her head and stared at her husband.

Intent, deadly accurate, in complete control, Castle brought the plane to a stop mere breaths from the dense rainforest.

He flipped a few levers, pulled off the headset. She came unstuck and ripped off her own ear protection, scrabbled at the safety restraint. Her blood was pounding, rushing through her thighs and vibrating her chest. She wrenched out of the seat and reached towards him, gripping his harness in her firsts. Castle's eyes locked on hers and she pressed her mouth to his in desperation.

He came in to her, hand gripping the back of her neck and twisting her hair, his teeth catching her bottom lip and tongue stroking. It was short and brutal and necessary and then they were breaking apart and Kate was falling back into her seat, panting.

They had landed.

* * *

Castle unsheathed the machete and held it lightly in one hand, checking the blade. This was one of many weapons his father had collected at the island station, but Castle had appropriated it for their trek today, along with a couple of packs carrying ammunition and supplies - though certainly not enough to last them very long.

Beckett was shouldering one of the backpacks, pulling her hair out from under the straps. She collected the long, lank strands of her hair and twisted it at the top of her head, secured it with a rubber band. Where she'd found a rubber band in the clusterfuck that had been their day, he had no idea, but piling her hair up highlighted her angular chin and the fierce cut of her cheekbones in the waning afternoon light. She looked like a warrior, and he was grateful for the show of strength.

This wasn't the Russian steppe, and they weren't crawling out of hell to save both their lives. They were two professional agents with a mission to accomplish and a support team in place at the ready.

Castle pulled the slim sat phone out of his shoe pocket and thumbed it on. While he waited for it to load, he repacked his bag, adjusting the things inside so he could get to the ammo faster. The water canteen went into an elastic pocket on the outside, and his knife was lashed to his thigh in its harness.

He quickly texted Mitchell to let him know they'd landed, and then he activated the tracking link and sent it to Beckett's phone. The sat phone would keep them on Mitchell's radar just in case anything happened, and Beckett could act as his guide from behind him, keep them on track. He stowed the phone carefully back into his boot and stood up again.

"We should avoid the lower lying areas," she said quietly. She was scanning the tactical map on her phone, her bottom lip getting worked over by her teeth.

"It gets swampy, yeah," he said. "Plus flash floods when the rain starts."

"Plenty of trees to scale if that happens, but also - the bugs and beasts. I don't relish coming across native wildlife drawn to the water."

"Bugs are often worse than the beasts," he grimaced. "Have you ever been bit by a blow fly?"

"Oh, gross, no," she flinched. He'd never seen anything _gross_ faze her before. "That's the one that lays eggs under your skin. Have you?"

"Yeah."

"Shit." She wriggled her shoulders under the straps and her mouth twisted. He'd really gotten to her with that one.

"You just have to get it dug out. They don't kill you."

"Stop," she insisted, holding her hand up, her head turning away.

"Really?" he laughed.

"Shut up," she muttered. "It's making my stomach roll."

He was perversely enjoying it too. But he only closed his mouth and shrugged his shoulders back at her, turned to his pack and got everything settled.

"Can I have the extra knife?" she asked quietly.

"I don't know. Can you? You know you don't have a great track record with knives."

She huffed at him and elbowed him out of her way, pulled the extra knife and its sheath from the pile of stuff still packed into the body of the Cessna. He watched her strap it on at her thigh, watched her hands tugging to make it tight, and he couldn't help the surge of protectiveness that rose in him when she kept getting it wrong.

He knew it was petty, that he was rubbing her nose in it at every turn, but he found himself still seriously pissed off that she'd put her own neck to the knife.

Pissed or scared - he wasn't sure which.

Castle leaned in and knocked her hands away, pushing her back into one of the passenger seats inside the belly of the Cessna. She grunted when she sat down hard, but she didn't say anything as he rewrapped the harness around her thigh.

The velcro stayed true but he let his fingers tug on it to check anyway, sliding between the material of her jeans and the black strap, heat flaring in his guts. He glanced up at her and she was staring down at his hands, lust crawling behind her eyes.

"You got our army rations?" he scraped out, his voice raw.

"Yeah," she said instinctively. Her head came up and her cheeks were flushed, but she patted the backpack still on her shoulders. "I checked. All of them."

"Weapons?"

"My Sig, the knife, and the automatic rifle - though it's disassembled in my bag."

"Water."

"Two canteens. You have water?"

"One," he nodded. "It's enough. We're not staying long. We found Black and he'll have provisions anyway. But Beckett - three days out. That's all we get. Three days to hike out, and if there's nothing, we turn around and come back for the plane."

She nodded.

"I'm fucking serious," he said quietly. "You come back with me to the plane, we regroup to Libreville."

"I know," she rasped. "I promise."

He reached out and took hold of the straps of her backpack, hauled her in against him, their foreheads crashing. She sucked in a breath and put her hands at his waist, fisting his shirt.

"Okay," he got out after a moment. "Let's go."

* * *

She stayed well behind him, watching the bunch and play of muscle under his shirt as he hacked at the terrain with the machete. He was probably taking out on the underbrush what he wanted to take out on her, but she couldn't help her fascination with the way his body moved through the dense African jungle.

Kate wanted him in a really desperate but inappropriate way.

She knew it was a product of anguish, that she made herself feel better by having him, but she also knew that he was going to explode if she didn't do something to help him. He was deeply angry with her - for reasons she had to admit she didn't quite comprehend - and he was refusing to acknowledge it existed.

Maybe taking a machete to the rainforest would help, but not for long.

He was the kind of man who had been trained to suppress all of it - let it roll right off of him - and she appreciated that. She knew she had enough issues to keep them both occupied, but it meant they tended to forget his.

He was seriously pissed.

But he wanted her too, and that made him angrier, and that was a problem.

If he'd just let her-

Castle whacked at a tree and got the machete stuck in the trunk; he cursed and she sighed, pausing in the trail of carnage he'd left behind. Decapitated birds-of-paradise flowers, decimated vines, orchids shredded, mangrove roots butchered. Philodendrons with thorny protrusions were in pieces, weeping chlorophyll and thready bark.

The rest she had no names for. Sucker roots, tendrils of green, waxy leaves that still held rainwater - not just a few mouthfuls but _gallons_ - an entire ecosystem in miniature, with tadpoles swimming in the deepest pools, a scorpion crawling through a clump of twigs, and a cluster of flies, all within the bowl of a leaf. She saw moss and ferns, air plants with no discernible means of support, mushrooms sprouting over a thick film of decomposing vegetation. And that was just the growth at hip level.

It was a riot of life, and most of it deadly.

Kate hurriedly came to his side and touched his back as he grunted at the tree. "Here," she murmured. "Step back."

Castle glared at her, but let go of the machete's handle. She used her boot to kick at the blade where it was lodged in the side of the tree. After four good blows, it popped out, tumbling to the forest floor.

"Careful," she warned as he bent to pick it up. "I saw a scorpion back there."

"And snakes, I'm sure. Poisonous tree frogs. Man-eating venus flytraps."

Kate glanced to where he was pointing now with the machete and saw he was right. What she'd call a venus flytrap looked to be the size of a cow, the open maw dripping with paralyzing venom.

"Holy shit," she gasped.

"Yeah, exactly. Nice little trip to the woods you've planned for us, Beckett."

Some of the bitterness was gone from his voice this time, the sarcasm not quite so heavily laced with anger. She looked at him and he held out his free hand to her.

"Come here," he muttered. His eyes flickered over her, a sudden reluctant concern.

She stepped closer and he grabbed her arm, drew her against him. When she came at his side, he reached up, covered her shoulder with his cupped palm and seemed to scrape. In a moment he was throwing something deep into the underbrush.

"What was that?" she whispered.

"Spider." He gave her a crooked, pained smile. "Pretty - uh - big. Not sure how'd you react to that."

"I'd be okay," she said slowly. "Rats don't bother me, spiders. How big?"

"Hairy tarantula big," he admitted. "And it filled my whole hand."

She blinked. "Shit."

"Yeah. This is going to be interesting."

Suddenly Beckett's senses were opened and she realized the whole rainforest was _alive_ with sound and movement. Beasts deep in the jungle were out there, just beyond their vision, and a million different insects lurked. It wasn't just the blow flies or the spiders - it was everything. The whole rainforest was _aware_.

"This is... how are we going to _sleep_ out here?"

"One eye open," he joked. His smile fell flat though and he grimaced at her. "We have a pup tent. We'll have to be very careful to seal it tight."

She nodded and gripped the straps of her backpack, her eyes scanning the jungle ahead. "And Black... he's out here somewhere in all this."

"He must have a station, a depot or a facility. My father's not the type who roughs it, you know."

"Good point," she said, letting out a breath. "All right. Lead on, Castle. Standing still will only let this place grow up around us."

She saw goose bumps flare across his forearms, but other than that, he seemed completely impassive. Castle turned and hefted the machete once more, his phone and the map-tracking system in his other hand, and he started clearing their path through the growth.

But he moved a little more carefully, taking time to pause and inspect his way before carving out their route. And Beckett kept a little closer, her ears filled with the noise of a predatory rainforest.

* * *

Hacking away at vines and shit actually helped.

He felt less likely to take her head off now that he'd decapitated a few thousand pretty, delicate orchids. He actually could focus on the map and the tracker still lodged in his father's forearm. He could plot their distance and figure out the remainder.

"We'll have to make camp within the hour," he said finally.

"What?"

She sounded horrified. Castle glanced over his shoulder and saw she was staring at him. "What, what?"

"Why _now_?"

"Because we're coming up on a river we'll have to cross - it's miles wide, Beckett, and it will take hours. We don't have hours before the sun sets and we're screwed."

She flinched.

"Why?" he muttered. "You afraid to camp with me?"

"No." But her eyes shifted to him and then back to the jungle that even now seemed to crowd them together. "No, I'm not afraid of you."

"I didn't say me," he murmured. "I said camping with me - enclosed space. No room to turn over. Skin to skin."

"You're getting a little ahead of yourself," she retorted. "Don't you think?"

He couldn't help the laugh that ripped out of him. "Yeah. Got me there, baby. Fine. Let's go, then. We only have an hour to find a good place."

She hesitated to come near to him, and he was damn tired of that. So he reached out with his free hand and closed it around the strap of her backpack, hauled her into him. Her breath caught and he knew now - for sure - why she didn't want to make camp in an hour.

She fucking wanted him. Badly.

_Well, too bad, Kate. You made your bed. Now lie in it._

* * *

Three day limit. That was what he'd told her.

Three days to find Black and track down the last of the regimen. Three days and this was _day one_. And it was already over.

Beckett pressed the tent peg into the soft, damp earth with the heel of her boot, sinking it as far as it would go.

Day one was over.

Just like that. They hadn't even covered five miles. Five miles. She'd heard stories in training about guys going 45 miles in one day over rough terrain with light packs - about nine pounds - and for some reason, she'd imagined them doing the same. Of course, those guys had been in the midst of deep survival runs, trailblazing up steep hills going at what might be called a mild sprint. She hadn't thought they'd range that far, but five miles?

"Sink it deep, Beckett," he called from the other side. "The ground is so soft from the rain that it will work its way loose in the night."

"I am," she sighed. "It's nearly six inches."

"Deeper."

She didn't miss the double entendre or the look his eyes flashed her - like he wanted her or he wanted to shake her, and either one might do it for him.

She wanted him too, but she couldn't keep reaching out for a man who didn't know what he wanted. Better to keep her hands to herself and let him figure out how to forgive her, how to love her again without it making him furious in the loving.

And if her chest cracked open at even the thought of not having him, she'd manage to survive it.

Right?

* * *

Castle went back around the round pup tent and sank her pegs a little deeper. Either they'd already worked their way up or she hadn't pushed them as far in as he'd like, but either way, he used the end of a stick to drive them farther.

Night had fallen quickly, just as he'd thought, and the jungle was a living, breathing, ferocious thing. He swatted at another fly and rolled his head on his neck, testing to make sure he hadn't been bitten, and then he tossed the stick aside and faced the tent.

Had to do it. Nothing else left. Their packs were sealed up and pushed inside, the tent flaps were open for ventilation, the mesh fine enough that it repelled water as well as mosquitoes. He'd made sure they weren't in the basin near the river, so they had a clear elevated space that wouldn't get flooded should it rain and the water head for low-lying land. Also - away from snakes this way too.

No good standing outside in the dark listening to the hornbills and bush babies getting overly friendly.

Time to go inside, hunker down for the night.

Castle dropped to his knees and unzipped one flap, pushing inside fast to keep from letting bugs in with him, and then he zipped it up again quickly. He twisted around in the tight quarters and saw from the flare of the blue glow sticks that Beckett was lying down, flat on her back, her eyes on the mesh side of the tent.

One sleeping bag. He couldn't, for the life of him, remember why he'd thought that had been a good idea. A lighter pack? He'd carry another sleeping bag if it meant the relief of not having to... ask.

For whatever it was they were doing.

He shucked his jacket and shoes, stuffed the outer gear into the insides of his boots to keep critters out - just in case - and then pushed everything towards their feet. She'd already neatly piled up her own things, and when he looked back at her, she'd raised one arm and pressed it over her eyes, the pale skin like an ultraviolet path straight to the nectar of her mouth. He ached to lie down with her, release it all, but he didn't know how.

She'd been willing to kill herself for him and he couldn't take it.

She sighed and turned onto her side, her back to him, and Castle could see the luminous wave of her shoulder, the curve of her neck. He sank to his haunches and sat at the bottom of the sleeping bag, refusing to move. Unable. He couldn't.

There was silence for a long time, her breathing too fast for her to be asleep, his own brain buzzing with need - but it was need he couldn't understand or categorize, and he was afraid of what he'd do. Hurting her seemed the most likely end result - and while physically she'd want it, he would hurt himself more in the process.

Emotionally... maybe he was doing just as much damage sitting here like a damn fool.

Her body seemed to draw in on itself, her face buried in the fold of the sleeping bag, and he didn't know what to do.

Except maybe keep hurting them both.

Castle leaned forward on one hand, his knee down for balance and the whole tent crowding his back, and then he touched the soft shell of her ear where it rose elfin-like in the near-dark.

"Kate," he sighed.

He felt her caught breath, the half-turn of her body towards him.

"I'm crawling in," he murmured.

"Please," she sighed, and it didn't sound like a plea at all, only relief.

Castle slid his body into the space behind hers and somehow, some way, they fit together still.

He kissed her neck, and she touched his thigh, and it wasn't all-forgiven, but it was as close as they could get.


	2. Chapter 2

**Close Encounters 15**

* * *

There was nothing she could do. Nothing more. She had done everything she knew to do and he was still here.

But now she saw that if she was falling apart over him, then she wasn't _partnering_ him. And maybe this was the first time she truly understood how unfair it was. How she took from him but she didn't give back the way he needed it.

She was so tired of being careful, trying not to say the wrong thing, trying not to hurt him any more than she already had, trying not to remind him of what she'd done. At least now there was only this, his body against hers and the night and the way they came together in a cramped tent in the Congo. He did it for her and she did it for him and that was it.

"I love you," he whispered.

"I know," she sighed. Her arm shifted up and curled around his neck, tightening, bringing him ever closer.

Whatever she'd done, whatever she hadn't done, it didn't matter. He was angry, but he still loved her.

"I love you, too."

His breath came out hard against her forehead. "I know. If it means a jungle in the Congo or an island off Tunisia or a knife to your throat, so long as there's this..."

She had to stop doing this to him, because he was always going to take it.

* * *

Kate woke violently in the darkness and felt Castle's harsh, alert grip over her mouth, his voice at her ear.

"Quiet, quiet, baby, hush."

She stilled, heart thumping painfully, adrenaline spiking, but she finally heard the sounds he'd heard, the sounds that had evidently woken him.

The sounds of someone in the jungle outside their tent.

_Black?_

They were tangled in the sleeping bag, the darkness so absolute that all she could see were the faint impressions of where Castle had been after his movement away. She settled her heart rate and focused on the sounds, trying to discern the shape or size, the intentions of the thing outside.

A drag and thump, the shiver of the tent's mesh vent like a breath passing over it. Castle eased away from her, slowly, quietly, and she wished she hadn't stripped off all her clothes in the damp heat of their tent, wished she had on at least her underwear. Shit.

Beckett sat up and the sleeping bag fell away, sliding down and exposing her; it was so dark that Castle didn't even falter. His fingers slipped down past her thigh and she twitched, holding her breath, but he was only pulling out a sheathed knife.

Where the hell had he been keeping _that_?

Castle withdrew the blade and then gestured for her to get the pack. Her gun, apparently, and she sighed and resigned herself to doing this naked. He was always taking things on naked; it was a bad habit.

He held up two fingers, wriggling them so she could see their movement in the darkness, and she caught in another breath, readying herself for it - whatever it was.

She went first, as was their usual takedown procedure, slowly unzipping the bottom of the tent. Castle covered her, practically breathing down her neck as she eased aside the flap.

There was a vast, listening silence on the other side and Castle pressed his palm to her bare back, cautioning her. Beckett kept her gun in front of her, ready, and scanned the pitch-black terrain.

She could vaguely make out the dark shadows of the underbrush that Castle had been forced to clear to put down the tent, and past that she saw the blurred black of the trees pressing close. But whatever starlight or moon might be out tonight couldn't penetrate the dense canopy of trees and vines overhead, and the shapes she thought she saw might be something else entirely.

More sinister.

Castle pressed his fingers into her back and they both cautiously got low to the earth, letting the flap of the tent provide their cover. She realized that the tent itself was camouflaged and gave off no light, blending equally into the darkness.

She let her eyes strain and rove over the muffled forms of black, searching for something, anything, though she knew that whatever was out there was doing the same. Waiting.

"Should we risk the light?" Castle said against her ear, a faint stirring of breath rather than sound. She hesitated and finally pressed her elbow into his side in a wordless _no._ Better keep what advantage they might have.

"Glow stick?" she mouthed.

He hummed an agreement and slithered back into the tent. Beckett kept her eyes on the jungle but now used her ears to listen - _listen_ - and pay attention. She heard her own breathing and struggled to control it, dampen the effort of her lungs, and then the night sounds of the jungle came crashing over her.

It was _loud_. Shit, it was loud. Furious insect noises - screams and screeches and whistles and saws that echoed and chorused from all around them. There had to be animal sounds below that, within it, but for the life of her, Beckett couldn't find them.

And then she did.

Breathing. Low and harsh, with a quality to the air like exhaling through a cloth - filtered or clogged. And close.

Very close.

Castle's hand touched her calf in warning and then his body was pressing in beside hers with their shoulders out of the flap, searching together. She felt the hard rod of the glow stick between them and Castle bringing it forward, but she reached back and stopped him with a squeeze around his forearm.

He paused.

She couldn't even see Castle in all this unrelenting black, and she searched her hand up to his neck until she found his face, turned his chin in the direction she'd heard those sounds.

He pressed in close, silent and watchful, and they listened together. But this time there was only that immediate and present sense of sentience just beyond them.

"Have to," he breathed against her ear. She nodded. Castle brought the glow stick up once more and slowly slid it out from the cover of their bodies.

The blue light of the stick she'd broken and lit earlier in the evening, now so dim after the hours of chemical reaction had settled down, still glowed brilliantly in the darkness.

And animal eyes gleamed back.

* * *

"Shit," he cursed, dousing the glow stick under his hands.

Gorilla. Western lowland, an endangered species that nonetheless were prevalent in this area. The long, hairy forearms had been in a dominant pose, the eyes focused directly on them from under that low brow.

Beckett pressed harder into his side and they sank down, towards the tent's half-unzipped entrance, hoping they hadn't been seen as a threat. He pushed his body over the glow stick and nudged Beckett's shoulder, found her ear and tugged.

She nodded and they listened, Castle closing his eyes for a second to control the mad pulse of his heart.

A gorilla. A male gorilla, he hoped, because they roamed the rain forest independently as bachelors. A male would mean it was the only one - no reinforcements - and it might just consider them too unknown a threat to take on.

Beckett shifted beside him and then he caught the faint huff of animal breath in the darkness, a sense of shuffling. He gritted his teeth and strained to see but not even his spy regimen could overcome the black.

Beckett's hand laid over his, her fingers stroking for his attention. He lifted his thumb to let her know she had it, and she drew a circle over the back of his hand, followed by a tap at the top - a clock, he knew - and then she dashed a quick line towards what would be the two.

Gorilla at two o'clock. Yeah, he knew that - the damn glow stick had lit up the world.

She tapped his hand again, more insistently, and he realized she was trying to tell him more. He lifted his thumb, hunkering down deeper into the tent, trying to keep them both shielded, and Beckett swiped her fingers across his knuckles.

Okay, so their unspoken communication had been honed by years of mission work and their natural, intense connection, but he had no fucking idea what that was.

Castle caught her hand, flipped it, drew a question mark.

She let out a breath and drew the clock on his hand again, but this time, the hour hand pointed directly at the twelve.

Oh. Fuck. She thought the beast had moved - and dead ahead.

Castle elbowed her back, tried not to let the glow stick roll out from under his body as they slowly made an agonizing retreat.

And then - just as she'd thought - he heard movement from directly in front of them. A rattle in the gorilla's chest that came to his ears like a scream, and Castle drew the knife in front of them, rocked to a squatting position to defend them.

But the attack never came. They heard the rustle of the forest some ways distant and Beckett uncovered the glow stick.

The gorilla was leaving, departing as near-soundlessly as he'd come, that lurched gait as his long arms took him farther and farther into the densest part of the jungle.

Beside him, Kate let out a shaky breath and put down her gun, head bowed forward.

"It occurs to me," she croaked, "that the gorilla is probably the least threatening creature out here."

"You're right." Castle slowly sheathed the knife and zipped the tent flap closed once more. "And we haven't even made it to the river."

* * *

They took shifts outside the tent until the sun came up. Beckett was the one on guard when the light diffused through the trees, subtle and green, and she shifted from the balls of her feet back to her haunches, poised with her gun between her knees.

The jungle was already teeming, moans and calls, rustling and crashing, the cacophony of millions of miniature ecosystems. She'd already seen hornbills flap away in the trees, one massive snake that had been mere feet from where she'd been perched, the reptile winding its way through the underbrush, using the thick vegetation like a step ladder.

The tent shivered behind her and she spun around to see Castle emerge, his hair spiky with sleep.

Of course he'd managed restful sleep. Only her spy could drop off into deep slumber for a handful of hours and stay there until that internal alarm brought him fully alert again.

"All's quiet," she assured him. "Or, well. Not quiet exactly, but uneventful."

"Good," he nodded, standing up to stretch. She couldn't help watching the play of lean muscle under the thin, tight-fitting t-shirt, the massive power of his arms as he raised them over his head. He rolled his head on his neck, dropped his hands to his sides, and flexed his wrists. "Bathroom."

She watched him pace away from their camp, a clench in her chest when he disappeared. "Castle," she called. "Where I can see you. It's uneventful, but there's..."

He came into view with a gesture to indicate he'd heard her, and then she kept him at the corner of her vision as he finished. When he came striding back to her, she sank back on her heels in relief.

Castle reached out a hand for her, a solemn look on his face. "Your turn."

She took his hand and let him carry her upwards, rising to stand at his side.

"Don't go far," he murmured, handing her a stack of paper.

"No, I won't." She wrinkled her nose but headed the direction he'd gone; this was her least favorite part of the CIA life. In Paris and Rome, of course, they usually had bathrooms, but a few times now they'd been forced to camp. At least she wasn't cramped in the dark belly of a Russian cave.

Though she did have to climb over roots as thick as one of Castle's thighs just to find a spot. She used a root for balance to go the bathroom, buried the paper in the soft loam at her feet, rubbed her hands together briskly until heat made her skin tingle. Castle had antibacterial stuff when she got back, shared it with her.

"We're maybe an hour's climb to the river."

"Climb?" she said. Her voice was rough with sleeplessness. In her mind's eye, she still saw the gorilla staring them down in the dark.

"It gets thicker," he warned. "These roots - the strangler figs and climbing vines - they all compete for the light."

"I've noticed it's - well, it's darker than I expected. Hard to know when the sun really rose this morning."

"Not long ago," he promised. "Internal alarm."

She glanced around them, the deep shadows and the moving things - leaves or shrubs or ferns or snakes... all kinds of life. "So getting to the river will be rough."

"Yeah, why I wanted to stop here last night. How are the flies?"

She winced and rubbed a welt at her neck. "Bad."

"Worse as the day goes on. Worse on the river too." He scanned the wilderness around them, searching for something or taking stock - she didn't know. "There's an African geranium that acts like citronella. You know what geraniums look like?"

She grunted in surprise and swept her eyes across the dense riot of plants before them. "Not... exactly. How is it that _you_ know this stuff?"

"Survival training, Beckett." He gave her a look, appraising or maybe re-appraising, and she tried not to stiffen under his perusal. "The intensive courses my father put me through every year. More than just the basics."

She nodded. "I can search for images on my phone," she offered. "See what I find around here?"

"Yeah. Break open the stems, crush up the leaves, see if it helps. Careful applying it though - the oils can burn and we've got nothing to dilute it. Don't waste your water."

She pulled her phone out of her back pocket and checked her satellite reception. The signal was clear and she quickly called up images of both citronella and the African geranium. The leaves of the citronella were thin and almost jagged, like what she'd always thought poison oak looked like, while the African geranium seemed to resemble clover.

Wildly different-looking.

Beckett dragged a hand through her hair and ignored the prick of frustration, turned away from the tent where Castle was beginning to dismantle it. He should be doing this, not her, because she could get the damn tent rolled up faster than she'd find a geranium.

Still, she began a careful search of their environs, hoping to discover it on accident.

The jungle wasn't sexy and steamy like she'd thought; in fact, this was about the worst place to try to seduce him into forgiveness.

* * *

As they hiked, Castle didn't need to check on her progress behind him; he could hear her grunts as she clambered over thick, shallow roots that had curled up in their quest for water. He could hear every step she made at his back, the heaviness of her pack and the last few days' violence combining to make this hike brutal on her.

He had set a moderate pace. He didn't want to exhaust her, but he'd given them a three-day window and they needed to be more than halfway to Black by nightfall. He didn't want to test her resolution, wasn't sure she actually _would_ go back with him if they didn't find Black in that three-day time limit.

In fact, he was pretty certain she would hare off on her own and get them both killed when he followed - malaria or dehydration or one of the many deadly predators out here.

So why had he set the time limit? Why the hell had he made them a deadline at all?

Blowing smoke, that's all. Pretending he had any control over what happened to her, control over who got close enough to do damage and who didn't. He wanted to bully her into submission, but he knew - logically knew - that the woman he loved didn't go quietly.

And he wouldn't have fallen in love with her if she had.

Damn it. He was a masochist, asking for the pain every time. And even knowing that, he still couldn't help how he loved her.

"Castle."

He stopped at the base of a tree whose low-hanging limbs he'd been ducking under, turned and glanced back at Kate.

"Give me a minute," she said, her face twisting. For a second he thought she was in pain, and then he realized that the _asking_ was what had her in her knots.

She didn't want to stop, but she had to, and asking was torture.

Hell, at least there was that. One small measure of responsibility in an overwhelming sea of fucked-up, stupid-ass decisions she'd made lately.

"We'll stop," he said, halting where he was and sitting on the tree limb he'd been about to climb under. The branch had some give and he sank a few inches, but Kate stood hunched low before him like she didn't quite understand.

"I..."

"Sit, Beckett. Grab your canteen. We'll eat something."

She chewed on her lip and glanced past him, but he knew what she saw - more tree limbs and roots tangled like an overgrown obstacle course. If she wanted to find a clearer spot - wasn't going to happen.

Beckett sank down to a gnarled root that projected up from the ground, and Castle watched her carefully from the corner of his eye as she eased out of her pack. Her shoulder and neck must be killing her - the bruises were livid. He had to think that every step jarred pain straight through her bones and reverberated in her grazed cheek, made it hurt to speak, hurt to eat.

They'd had a few pieces of beef jerky and a couple of oranges this morning after breaking down their camp; he couldn't remember whether or not she'd eaten everything.

He sloughed his own pack and unzipped the top compartment, handed her some of the softer, easier-to-chew saltine crackers. She took the sleeve with a look on her face he couldn't identify and then he realized what it was for.

Russia. One of the first solid foods she'd eaten in those damn caves with him.

Castle propped his elbows on his knees and hung his head, swallowing down the urge to knock her out, scoop her up, and carry her out of here on his back, just go _home_. But he knew if he did, she'd be right back here the moment she came to consciousness.

Also, it probably wasn't nice to knock out your wife. No matter how obsessively irrational she was being.

He rubbed at his forehead with two fingers and closed his eyes, tried to take his mind off of Tunisia with a mental inventory. His canteen was a heavy-duty water filtration bottle; he had another four days of rations in his pack and the fold-down tent as well; she was carrying her own water, the collapsible raft, and slung through the loops was the automatic rifle. They both carried their personal guns in holsters - Kate's at her back under the pack and Castle's at his thigh next to the knife. He had the machete that was good only for the less-woodsy underbrush - not these massive roots - and he had-

"Castle."

He glanced over and she was standing up, her fingers wrapped around the strap of her pack, ready to hoist it onto her shoulder again.

"You ready?" he said.

She nodded and carefully moved to put her pack on, but Castle couldn't stand it any longer. He reached out and hefted it for her, took her hand and drew it through the strap gently, keeping the weight off of her still. She maneuvered her other arm into the second strap and reached up to take the load.

Castle settled the pack on her shoulders gently, as lightly as he could, and then he couldn't help leaning in and softly brushing his lips over the vivid, brilliant bruise inching up her neck.

He felt her breath catch and he stepped away, leading them through the root system in the dense jungle and down - ever down - towards the slopes of the river.

* * *

It was ridiculous but her heart was like a little rabbit's heart in her chest, pounding hard and small and rapidly so that her whole body shook with it.

He'd kissed her neck.

She shivered and rubbed her hands over the goose bumps on her arms, paid closer attention to where she placed her feet.

He'd helped her put the pack on her back and he'd leaned in and brushed his soft, dry lips over the sweat and dirt and grime of her skin.

She felt like she had that first night meeting him - when he'd touched her in her bedroom, his fingers at her knees as she'd laid in bed and feigned sleep. He'd been keeping watch, and the Chinese had come later, but in those dark hours with him, he'd sat at on the floor and leaned his head against the mattress and she had reached out for him.

And he'd turned to her. Put his hand at her knees, fingers sliding between them, squeezing the back of her knee as if to comfort her. And he'd talked. About everything - he'd told her his story and what had happened to him and why he was there with her, his confessions had spilled out of him into the night, stories he told just for her, only her.

Same feeling she had now. Like her world had been inverted, popped out from concave to convex so that everything had slid out from her center, a jumbled and chaotic mess, nothing where it was supposed to be.

Over time, Castle had weighted her, had stabilized her so that their world together was concave, a deep bowl that spilled everything into their center. The two of them in existence, contained and containing, orbiting each other. That was what love had done.

But his kiss against her neck had flipped everything inside out. Like they were new again. Like she hadn't gutted him out by running to his father for help.

But she _had_. She had seen it in his eyes and felt it in every icy touch since. She'd pushed him too far - she'd broken him - and the idea that they could still find this, that he wanted to touch her, wanted her at all - it gave her hope.

And even though she knew hope was such a dangerous, deadly thing - even though she'd been brutalized by hope before - Kate Beckett still let it flood through her.

He'd kissed her neck like he was _in_ love with her.

* * *

She had to maneuver her way down a precipitous slope, clutching tree limbs and vines and climbers when they were available, sometimes sliding on her ass when a plant she'd been using as a foothold turned out to be rooted in air.

Once he had to crash back through the dense growth and catch her by the strap of the pack to halt her progress down the slope. If the sharp grab had wrenched her shoulders and made her jaw ache, she only wrapped her hand around his forearm in thanks and let him haul her onto her feet once more.

She always used touched to center herself with him, to find him again - a physical touchstone - but now she did it as a way of allowing him access - giving herself over - the requirement for relinquishing her own control and ceding it to him.

If it was feasible to hold his hand, she'd do it. But their trek through the jungle had gotten so close to the river now that they were literally climbing, hands and knees, down the side of a rooted slope. Holding hands was impossible - unless he was keeping her from falling.

"How's your shoulder?"

She glanced up, surprised to see him just beside her on the slope, an arm tucked through a tree root and hanging there like it was effortless. She was sweating and coated with detritus - the muck of decaying jungle plants plastered to her jeans. "Okay."

"Hurt like this?"

She felt it now that he'd pointed it out, and she winced, nodding at him. The throb of her bruised muscles went deep and she'd hoped that working it out would help - but it hadn't.

"See that tree root just below you?"

Kate glanced down, saw the snarled root where it had grown around some kind of boulder, the earth compacted there and stable, forming a ledge. "Yeah?"

"Can you reach it, babe?"

She nearly lost her grip on the creeper vine she'd wrapped around her hand. That casual and tossed-out _babe_ - like they were strangers on a trip and he was the charming spy. It made her heart thunder through her body, but it also pulsed pain in her already torn shoulders, made her recognize her limits.

"I can reach it," she said, feeling breathless now and dizzy. "I think."

"We'll take a moment there," he said. "Go on down. I'm right behind you."

She strained her foot towards the next hold, blinking rapidly to keep the sweat out of her eyes, and she felt her hand get hung up in the vine. She shook it off, trembling with the effort, and she realized Castle was paying incredibly strict attention to every move she made.

Which is why he'd known that she'd needed the break - even before she had.

"Kate. Easy. Just push your foot onto the root and use the vine."

She felt his hand wrap around the loop of her pack and take the weight for her, and it was suddenly just fine.

She could make it.

She felt the root with the very tips of her toes, let her boot come down on the gnarled ridge, slowly, until she had her balance.

Castle still held on to her pack, and he was working his way down to her with just one hand. She found a hollow where a rock had come free of the slope but the root below had grown around it, and she eased forward into it, gripping a climber vine with one hand. When her feet were firm, she glanced back up at him.

"You got this?" he murmured.

"Yeah, you can let go."

He did - carefully - and she braced herself for the weight of the pack once more, felt it lay over her strained shoulders and dig in. She swayed, and then gravity pulled her to her knees.

"Whoa, Kate-"

She gripped the vine to keep from falling even as it shredded the raw flesh of her palm like a rope burn. But Castle was there to catch her, an arm around her waist, his chest pressed to her side, his breath fast.

"Kate."

"Thanks," she croaked. Her shoulders hurt so much she could cry. Yesterday's hiking had brought the pain to the forefront, reawakening the bruises she'd gotten when Black's mercenaries had ambushed her in the hall. But this morning she really had thought she'd be able to work through it.

"Take this off," Castle growled. He was already doing it for her, his grip on the straps like iron, unbuckling the pack from her waist. "Sit."

"I've got advil in there," she told him. "If you-"

"Yeah, sit down," he said again, nudging her towards their precarious nest on the side of the slope. It was a steep fall from this point - the slope sheered off into a cliff just below them - and she sank to her ass gratefully.

"My water is-"

"I got it," he rasped. "I know what you need."

His voice sounded - caught. Like he was struggling. His eyes wouldn't meet hers and she realized stupidly that he was angry. He was - very angry. And it wasn't just with her - she'd seen that anger before; he always looked straight at her when he raged. No, this was with himself.

He was angry with himself over _her_.

_I know what you need_, he'd said.

"You do," she said into their awkward silence. The jungle cried and called and growled for them, a busy place filled with noise, the treed canopy swaying with a breeze that would never reach them on the floor below. "You take care of me."

His eyes flashed up to hers and away again. Recrimination and accusal and regret all in one look.

She took the advil and water he fished out of her pack and she swallowed the pills, not even asking how many milligrams, how high the dose. Trusting. Simply trusting that it was true - he took care of her.

She had to let him do that; she had to. Their therapy sessions had often centered around their mutual need for control. How many times had she given up the car keys to him in that effort? She didn't drive as often because he needed it more; she could do this for him too.

After all, he'd followed her out to Africa, to his _father, _because she'd made him come. Because she'd had an agenda and she'd made him fall in line. Because _she_ needed it.

She'd told herself, all this time, that she'd been doing it for him. To save his life. But, fuck, she hadn't been - she wasn't - was she? She was doing it for herself.

And he was forced to come along for the ride because... because he loved her. Because he wanted only to take care of her.

"We need to be on the river before sunset," Castle said then, still not looking at her. His jaw worked, a tic in the normally chiseled line that bunched and twitched as he breathed. He was on his haunches before her, the only room available on the narrow rim of the root's nest, and his hands dangled between his knees.

It was a posture of defeat and she'd seen it time and again lately.

"Castle." His chin came up in acknowledgement and still his eyes skirted hers - cataloging her condition but not meeting her gaze. The words left her, drying up in her throat, and she felt stupid, humiliating tears instead. All the ways she'd _hurt_ him. Was still hurting him.

"Hey," he grunted. "No. I - I'll rearrange our packs, take the inflatable from you at least. That should ease the weight. You'll make it."

She shook her head - that wasn't what she'd been trying to say - but he was already pulling stuff out, shrugging out of his own pack to consolidate what they had.

"Castle," she rasped. She lifted a hand to reach for him but her shoulder flared hotly and made her arm collapse back to her side.

"I promise," he said, glancing up at her now. His eyes were storm-clouds. "I told you I'd take you after him - and we will - we'll find Black and we'll get the regimen. I promise we will make it."

She wanted it to be true.

And for the first time, she didn't give a damn if they found Black on this trip. She just wanted them to make it.


	3. Chapter 3

**Close Encounters 15**

* * *

After their rest stop on the side of the slope, Beckett seemed to grow looser around him. Maybe it was swallowing those advil, or maybe it was rearranging their packs, but she seemed to have an easier time of it. There was still pain in her eyes that Castle didn't think he'd ever be able to erase, or at least not soon, and he had to find a way to live with that.

To live with how desperate she was for him.

What a fucking mess. She loved him and so she'd betrayed everything they were to keep him alive.

"Careful," he warned, gripping her arm when she put her foot through a hole made by the system of roots holding the slope together. The barely-there earth gave way beneath her boot and he caught her by the strap of her pack, hauled her away from the crumbling hole.

"Thanks," she breathed. He could feel her heart pounding in her chest where their torsos were pressed against each other. "It's - rougher than I expected."

"The terrain isn't ideal," he sighed. "Heading straight for the river like this... if we had more time, we could pick our way through the trails other animals have made. But we don't."

She nodded, her hair brushing his neck. He let go of her once she got her feet, and the sweat slicking his skin made his grip on her wrist difficult to maintain. Harder even to justify, since she had her balance again.

"Rick," she murmured.

He let go of her wrist with a sigh.

She caught his hand and laced their fingers; the electricity jolted through him and curled in his guts, made his breath catch. She came into him suddenly, her head fitting in under his chin like she was made for him, and he couldn't help drawing his arm around her.

He bumped the pack and tensed, but she shook her head and clung to him when he moved to let her go. "I'm okay. Don't go."

"We need to get down to the river," he rasped, but he didn't - he really didn't want to let her go.

"I know."

She brushed her lips at his jaw, faint and hopeful, and he found himself cupping the back of her skull and holding her there, hopeful himself. The jungle snarled and pulsed around them, beasts rustling and moving, and he had his wife close to his heart, breathing.

He shouldn't stay here long; he shouldn't waste what little time they had. He was still aching with what she'd done to them, what she'd done to herself, and yet he couldn't let go.

That was the hell of it.

He couldn't let go.

* * *

"Holy shit," she gasped.

The river came into view as she jumped down the last few feet into the brush. Wide as a lake, the water spread as far as she could see, brown and beaming with sunlight. Castle was a little ways ahead of her and he turned around, gestured for her to come.

"Quick. It's not safe near the water's edge."

"It's not?" she said, scrambling through the path he'd made with the machete towards the lapping water. He was standing knee-deep in the river and opening up the raft.

"No. Animals come down here to drink, and then... well, the stuff _in_ the river."

"Stuff."

"Yeah. You know."

No, she didn't know. But maybe she didn't want to know.

"Leg up, Beckett." He reached out and gripped her by the straps of her pack, hauled her towards him. She was soaked to the skin in seconds, the water warmer than she'd expected.

"Thanks for that," she muttered, narrowing her eyes at him.

He grinned - actually _grinned_ - back at her and nodded towards the raft that had now inflated. The plastic was camouflaged in the standard army greens, and she reached out to grab the black handle.

"Help me up?"

He cocked his head and gave her a leering smile that she didn't actually like. At all. "Sure, baby."

Castle reached out and gripped her waist, squeezed tightly, and then hefted her up and over the side. She bounced in the bottom of the raft, gasping, and then scrambled forward to the bow while Castle put a knee in and came after her.

The inflatable was a modified two-person Denali Llama - the only thing available in storage on the island base - and it contained one black contoured seat aft, and plenty of cargo room fore, allowing her space to sit. She took off her pack and lashed it to one of the straps of the boat and Castle did the same with his.

"You ready?" he said.

"We have to paddle?"

"No motor. But when we catch the current in the middle, we'll go pretty fast. There are reports of rapids ahead of us - about five miles worth - so it's going to get rough."

"All right," she said. She knew what he wasn't saying - the way back was going to be rough as well, and more so since they wouldn't be able to paddle against the current. They'd probably have to climb through the jungle until they found an area where they could be extracted... if they managed to get the regimen at all.

She was suddenly very aware of how ridiculous this was, how impossible. She'd set them up for a lot of work and effort and sweat and tears, and she wasn't even sure of the reward.

She wanted to believe that Black had escaped and gone straight for a secure location that would contain the regimen, just as he'd done in Tunisia when he'd set up the island base as his own. But she had no guarantee of that.

There were no guarantees at all.

Just hope.

"You ready?" he asked, settling down behind her in the contoured, rubber seat. His knees braced her shoulders, the fit pretty tight, and she saw him draw the paddle down into the water.

"Yeah, ready," she answered. She wrapped a hand around one of the black straps to give her something to hold on to, and she felt Castle's movement at her back as he started to paddle.

"Here we go."

* * *

Beckett wrapped her fingers around the black strap and hung on as the raft bounced over a swell in the rapidly-moving river. At her back, Castle was using the paddle to keep them from running into massive clumps of driftwood or sudden boulders; she could feel the hard points of his knees in her shoulder blades, the twist and heat of his body as he moved.

He angled them away from a thick protrusion of rotting logs, keeping the raft from catching on the gnarled arms. Something bumped them from below, jolting Beckett and making her grunt. Castle's knees squeezed at her shoulders as if to keep her in place.

She could do very little to help, could only grip the black strap tighter and watch the water. Their bags were lashed securely to the raft and would survive a dunking if they flipped, and Castle was doing all the work of steering them. She scanned the river as the current sucked them forward, impossibly fast, and she tried to spot the obstacles as they came up.

"Nine o'clock," she told him, even as the nasty-looking detritus began to scrape past the raft.

Castle poled it; she felt the bunch and play of his muscles as he leaned out far to push it away from them.

"Castle," she warned. But it was too late - the raft snagged on something she'd barely seen and they both were tossed from their seats as the raft jerked to a halt. Beckett gasped, the black strap abrading her already rope-burned palm, falling to the bottom of the raft. She felt Castle on top of her and scrambling to right himself, and then the lurch of the raft as the current dragged at them.

"Beckett," he called. "Need your help."

She scrambled up, her grip on the strap making her hand throb. Castle was half out of the raft, leaning far to work at something that had caught them underneath.

"It's tangled in one of the packs." His foot was hooked under the contoured seat to keep him anchored, but she reached out and gripped the back of his pants, pulling.

"The packs?" she said, trying to look over his shoulder. "How-"

"Here. Beckett. Grab this and then help me up."

She snagged the paddle from him before it could slip over the side of the raft, but it caused him to tip too far forward. She tossed the paddle into the bottom and grabbed him with both hands, groaning when the pain flared hotly in her palm and up to her elbow. She hauled Castle back into the raft and they both fell to the bottom, the raft bouncing as it rushed on through the current.

"Shit," he gasped.

"No kidding."

"The paddle?"

"It's - under me," she grunted, feeling the hard end jabbing at her back.

"Sorry, baby," he muttered, shifting to try to get off of her. Her hands were still tangled in his belt loops and she gasped as he tore away, felt her palm throb in pain. "What's wrong?"

"My - hand."

He pushed off over her, but his arm came under her shoulders as he moved, pulled her with him. They were cramped in the bottom of the raft, legs tangled, but he cradled her hand in his own, thumb smoothing out her fingers so he could look at it. The raft knocked into another piece of driftwood and they spun slowly, but Castle was intent on her hand.

"Rope burn?"

"From the vines and - the strap here, just now."

He didn't blow up at her - which she'd been bracing herself for; he only reached back and hauled up the pack he'd rescued, brought it between them. She waited, knowing he intended on doing something, and she felt the raft knock into another hidden obstacle.

"The raft-" she started, squirming in the bottom to get at the paddle. "Here." She handed it over to him, thrusting it between Castle and the pack. "We have to get through the bad part here, where it's narrow, and then when it opens back out again, you can look at my hand."

Castle had grabbed the paddle out of reflex, mostly to keep it from smacking him in the face, but he narrowed his eyes at her.

"Castle," she said. "I'll survive without first aid for another thirty minutes. This first."

He scanned the river and then shoved the pack into the space under the contoured seat. He didn't say another word, but she knew he didn't like it.

But it couldn't be helped.

* * *

Shit.

Monsoon season.

Castle wiped the wet hair out of his eyes and rubbed his face on his shirt sleeve to clear his vision. Beckett was hunched at his knees, bailing water out with her bare hands (he wasn't happy about that at _all_), but the rain was insistent and overwhelming and had dumped on them out of nowhere.

Instead of the river opening up again, they'd made it to the beginning of a long course of rapids. Castle was working hard to keep them away from rocks and boulders and mounds of mud that crept up on all sides, shoving the raft from one obstacle to another like a pinball. The current was fast - scarily fast - and he barely had time to notice if Beckett was still with him or not.

He couldn't even _hear _her over the sound of rain on plastic and the roar of the river, the noise so loud and so dominant that it filled his head and whited out everything else. Castle jabbed the end of the paddle against a scree of boulders that looked like they'd recently torn away from the sloped side of the river bank, torquing his body to keep the raft away.

It was a durable little craft, the plastic was thick as hide, but he didn't know how many more scrapes and digs it would take. The rain beat down on his shoulders as he levered them back towards the middle of the river, away from the dangerous eddies that formed in these pockets. He felt the current grab hold of the raft and yank them away, spinning dizzily out.

"Castle!"

He gripped the side of the raft and hung on, turned his head to look at her.

She was scooping out handfuls against a monsoon. No way in hell.

He growled something that even _he_ couldn't hear, and then he got down on his knees and started bailing water. She gave him a grim look and he shook his head, ignored the regret and remorse swimming around with them. Because he knew under all that was something deeper - something like fire that drove her forward, ever forward.

A monsoon? She was undaunted still. So here he was.

He winced when the raft smacked into a boulder, _felt_ it against his ribs as the raft gave and then pushed back. Beckett grunted - he could see it even if he couldn't hear it - and he got out of his crouch to shove at the rock with the paddle. Then he came back to help her as the current sucked them along, their arms scooping the water out of the bottom as it poured over them.

Another jolt had his teeth rattling and their foreheads colliding. Beckett fell back on her ass and he grabbed for her, kept her from getting tossed straight into the rapids as the raft bucked sharply.

The plastic slapped down hard on the water and they were tossed together, but it also sheeted rain out of the bottom. The monsoon dumped water over them so heavily, so forcefully it stung his skin, replacing every gallon they'd just popped out. He reached past her and pushed the nose of the raft away from the cluster of rocks and back into the current again.

"The raft-" she called over the noise.

"Does us no good if we sink," he yelled back. The rain beat thunder into the plastic even as they pitched water overboard, heaving it, their arms tangling and fingers getting caught in each other's as they worked fast, desperate.

Desperate.

Didn't that just sum it up? Castle sank onto his heels and began to laugh.

Bailing out a monsoon as the raft bounced crazily in the rapids.

What else?

What fucking else?

* * *

The rain quit abruptly.

Kate sank back on her heels and stared, blinking water out of her face, stunned at the absolute cessation of the storm. For a second, they drifted like that, staring at each other as the water steamed from their clothes and hair, four or five inches still trapped in the bottom of the raft.

"Thank God," he rasped.

She pulled the hem of her shirt up and wiped water out of her face, lashes clumped together. Castle shifted her off of one of the packs and started repositioning their gear, the paddle still in one hand. She turned to look back up the river where they'd been, opening and closing her fist around the raw skin.

And then the raft smashed hard into a huge wall of rock, sending her half over the side. Castle shouted and grabbed for her, yanking her back into his chest, both of them sprawling to the floor of the raft.

"Castle-"

"I got it." He had to yell for her to hear him over the sound of the river water pounding against the wall. Beckett snaked an arm through one of the straps to hang on, scanning their current predicament. They were stick in a crescent where the river had eroded so severely into the rain forest that the two concave banks had cut a straighter path, causing the formation of an oxbow lake - like a tide pool on the shore, cut off and getting them nowhere.

Castle was already trying to pole them away from the wall of rock, pushing and bumping the raft along the bank, and she felt the sucking pull of the current dragging them _towards_ the cliff. The strange, sheer walls on either side of them had the raft trapped, while the main river went on out of sight around the bend.

When it didn't look like they could get free easily, she started using her hands as well, pushing against the wall of clay and sediment, the crumbling dirt of decay. She shoved as hard as she could, her fingers sinking into rot and gravel - and then she felt creatures crawling up her hand, around her wrist, up her arm - cockroaches.

Beckett yelled and jerked back, slinging her arm and slamming her knuckles into more rock. She yelped as _hundreds_ of scrabbling insects fall into the raft, got halfway to her feet before she realized she shouldn't stand in the boat.

"Sit down, Beckett, sit down!" he was yelling at her.

She teetered on the edge and Castle grabbed the back of her shirt, yanking her into him. She fell back, skin crawling, eyes riveted on the bugs even as Castle reached past her and scooped the huge cockroaches out of the raft and over the side into the water.

"Shit," she gasped. He grabbed another from the curve of her lap and tossed it overboard; she frantically wiped her clothes down. "Shit, shit, shit."

His arm snaked around her neck and held her close, their wet cheeks kissing. "Hissing cockroaches. That's all."

She pressed her hand to her chest and swallowed through the panic still rattling in her throat. "That's all." Just three-inch roaches.

His mouth came to her wet temple, a rough kiss, arm tightening. "That's all. Now help me get us out of here."

She shivered and got to her knees, reached for the river bank wall again. She gritted her teeth against the sensation of moving things and together they pushed the raft out of the meander and back into the current once more.

She could still feel the roaches crawling over her hand.

* * *

Castle wasn't a fan of cockroaches - who was? - but that little incident with the insects had pushed her right up against him, warm and tight. He could be a fan of that.

Once they'd pushed out of the meander and back into the main current, the fall of rocks and boulders had thinned out and finally the rapids had disappeared. They'd endured two more pop-up showers, sheets of rain dousing their raft, but they'd bailed out the water and were now being pulled along the center of the river.

It was broad here, wider than a football field, which accounted for the sheer force of the rapids - all of that water pushed through such a narrow space. The sun had begun to set, fiery and flaming the forest canopy, the treetops and thick growth painted red.

Castle hunched into the seat and put his elbows on his knees, his hands dangling over his wife's collarbones. Beckett leaned her cheek against his inside thigh, an arm wrapping around his calf. He swallowed and rubbed a hand down his face.

"Your hand," he said lamely. Not much to do for it now. She'd been bailing out river water, rain water, for hours now - and most likely infected by now.

She shifted between his knees and lifted her arm, unfurled her fingers. "Here."

He cradled her wrist, rubbing his thumb over the base of her palm, glancing at the raw places. "First aid kit's in yours," he said quietly.

She reached forward, the movement of her body making the raft bob in the quiet water. He watched her snake free the pack, opening it up and digging inside with her good hand. He still held her injured palm in his, and when she came back to him with the kit, he took it from her but paused.

"What?"

He didn't have the words, could only shake his head. He unsnapped the rubber and plastic lid, pulled out the antiseptic ointment from its spot. He smeared a generous amount onto her palm and dabbed it gently over her wounds, wincing in sympathy as fresh blood welled up. She didn't move.

Castle used the waterproof sealant on top, making her shoulders hunch at the sting of alcohol as it quickly dried. He put everything back into the kit and handed it over; she moved stiffly and replaced the kit in her pack.

"Here," he murmured. "Let me." He reached past her to lash the pack to the raft once more, a job that required two good hands, but he could feel her body practically under his. The space was tight and her shirt was soaking wet and clinging to his, her skin heated where they touched. Her good hand came to his back as if to anchor him - or maybe herself.

"Thank you," she sighed into his shoulder.

Castle sat back, spreading his knees again to give her room, but she came in close once more, her cheek against his inside thigh.

This time he dropped his hand to her head and combed his fingers through the tangles of her hair, drawing rhythmically over her ear and down her neck, unable to help himself.

He didn't say anything more and she didn't try either, and it was the easiest it'd been between them in a while.

She sucked in a long, staggering breath and closed her eyes.

The sun sank below the treeline and the river was dropped in twilight.

* * *

The raft was precariously cradled by the wide river, rocking and bobbing on the surface.

Castle watched the stars turn on, one by one, sharp points in the distance. The sky was one big bruise, purpling and blackening before his eyes, cut through by slits of light. The whole rain forest was a snarled beast waiting, crouched at the edge of the river, trying to push its way in.

With his elbows on his knees, his fingers kept tangling in her hair, almost despite himself. The lines of her hair snaked and curled around him, a rats' nest drying after the deluge. She sat at his feet, her cheek pressed to his thigh, her legs crossed in the bottom of the raft.

He watched the starlight paint her skin grey - grey down her neck, grey in the shallows of her collarbone, a deeper grey in the shadows of her t-shirt. He hooked his finger in the collar of her shirt, ran the back of his hand against her shoulder blade.

She stayed very still. Something about the night and the waiting, breathing beast of the jungle combined to give him clarity. She was alive, and sitting between his knees; she was alive and they were here together and whatever else was beyond the beast, whatever waited for them in the darkness didn't matter compared to that.

He touched his fingers lightly to the shadowed bruise at her neck and she sighed.

"Sleep," he suggested.

"Can't. Too wired." She glanced back at him apologetically, but it really had been just a suggestion.

"Me either. Keep me company then," he murmured. Castle lightly pushed his fingers into the bruise and then trailed along the back of her neck to the other side. She hunched her shoulders and let out a breath; he pianoed his fingers along the slope of her shoulder, softly kneading the muscles.

"Does it hurt?" he asked quietly.

"Yeah." She dipped her head forward on a sigh but he caught her by the chin and tilted her back against his leg. Her lashes were dark stains against her grey cheeks, the sweep of her eyebrows like thin wings.

He used both hands to knuckle into the sides of her neck - not hard enough to inflame the bruise, just deep enough to relieve the pressure. She sucked in a slow breath and let it out, and he could feel the knots releasing, the muscles untwisting.

"Hurts," she murmured.

"Too much?"

"Good hurt," she sighed. Her upturned face was alluring in the starshine, the tremble of her breath made him lean forward. He hunched protectively over her, her body between his knees, and he slowly lowered a kiss to her lips.

Her breath caught. Her fingers curled around his calf.

"Stay," he murmured.

Her lashes caught against his cheek and he grazed his mouth over her chin, her nose, trailed up to her forehead and pressed a kiss there. She was alive and she was breathing, the beautiful line of her neck like milk in the starlight, unmarred and smooth in the darkness.

She let go of his calf and tried to reach for him, but he pressed his thighs into her shoulders to keep there. She made a noise of frustration and he dusted a kiss at the corner of her eye.

"Stay," he breathed at her cheek. She lifted up into his kiss, asking for more, but he kept just out of reach, hovering above her, the heat of the jungle and the river wrapping around them.

"Castle," she sighed.

"Stay right here, Kate."

She dropped back between his knees and he eased his thumbs into the muscle of her neck, either side of her spine. She made a noise and her head tilted, hair brushing over the backs of his hands. He curled around her, a comma to the sentence fragment of her body, and he murmured his words into her skin - somewhere between his hands and his lips, trying to tell her everything.

She stayed, and she listened, and she leaned her cheek against his thigh and drifted along the current of his one-sided conversation.

_Please don't ever do that to me again. I love you, Kate, please._

The night sank over the river and made it black, eclipsing the raft. The water rocked and lulled, the current carrying them inevitably, irreparably forward.


	4. Chapter 4

**Close Encounters 15**

* * *

Kate wasn't exactly asleep - how could she sleep out here on the river? - but the rocking of the raft and the petting of his hand along her hair did something to bend time. She was awake and then she was waking up to the same gentle slide of the raft down the river, the water lapping against the plastic and his body warm against her side.

The darkness nudged her into awareness and she sat up, the humidity still wrapped around them, making her skin sticky. Castle shifted and let her go, his fingers catching in a tangle of her hair. She gave him a look and combed through it, tried to redo the pony tail to keep it off her neck.

"How's it out there?" she asked. The tension had crept back into the raft with them despite the way he let himself touch her now, and she wished she could ignore it.

"Quiet," he said. Quietly.

"Pretty underwhelming there, Castle," she sighed, rubbing her hand down her face.

He shrugged. "What am I supposed to say? It's quiet."

She grit her teeth and put her elbows on her knees, curling in on herself. And then she realized what she was doing and she straightened up, huffing a breath of frustration. "Say anything at all," she bit out. "Say you're furious with me. Say you're sorry. Say-"

"I'm _sorry_?" He jerked in the raft and it bounced against the water. "What do I have to be sorry for?"

"I don't know, Castle. I'm just saying-"

"I didn't do anything to _you_."

She fell silent. He was seething now, she could feel it, sense it, didn't even have to look at him. Right at her back and his body so strong and rippling with all that anger.

And shit, she wanted him. But that didn't _solve_ anything. It just postponed the inevitable. Maybe this was their moment, maybe they should just have it out.

"Maybe you should apologize," she said quickly. "Maybe if you hadn't ignored everything I said to you, we wouldn't be here."

"_What_?"

"I tried to tell you - I asked you to talk to your father. I didn't _want_ to have to-"

"What the hell?" He loomed over her, his eyes silver in the darkness. "You had a choice. And you chose to run to the one man who wants you _dead_."

"I didn't," she insisted. "There was no other option. I tried them all, Castle. But you would have died without the regimen. That isn't an option."

"There are _other ways," _he growled. "_Suicide missions_ shouldn't be on the top of your list."

"It wasn't the top of my list, you asshole. Are you even listening to me? I tried to talk to you. I asked you to talk to your father and you completely shut me down. You wouldn't even consider it. Not only that, but you made it clear you wanted nothing to do with the regimen."

Castle slammed his fist into the raft and it popped hard over the water, made her clench her teeth and grab one of the straps. Her hand flared with pain at the raw places and she glared up at him in the moonlight.

"Don't go all caveman on me, you big bully. That's our whole problem here. I can't get you to even consider it, and so I go behind your back and do something extreme like I'm trying to get your fucking attention."

"Well, you have my fucking attention now," he hissed. "So what is it, Beckett? What?"

"Give it a chance. That's what I'm saying. The regimen - it _saves your life_, Castle. And I need you alive. So just... fucking live with it."

"I guess I have to now, don't I? But here's my problem. If I 'fucking live with it' and it's cost you _your life_, then what the hell am I living for? It's worthless to me without you."

Kate sucked in a breath and heard him doing the same, both of them fought to a bloody pulp and wincing back to their corners. Except she didn't think it had to be a fight - they were saying the same things here.

She loved him, wanted him alive, and he loved her, wanted her alive.

"This is..." He stopped and cleared his throat, his head hanging down now so that his voice came between his knees. "This is stupid."

Yeah, it was. "What else can I do?"

He rubbed a hand down his face. "You know that famous story? The one about the gifts this couple give each other? Something stupid about hair and combs. I don't know. I read it once and it was awful."

"'The Gift of the Magi.'" She sighed and tilted her head back against the sloped side of the raft. "Shit."

"Is that the name of it? It sucks. I hate it. I _hate_ it, Beckett. That story... I feel like that's what we're doing."

"It's cosmic irony," she said, her voice escaping to the night sky. "They have no money but they want to get each other Christmas gifts that mean something. So she sells her hair and he sells his watch - and then she buys him a watch chain and he gets her combs for her hair. It's supposed to be beautiful, Castle. A testament to their love. What they're willing to sacrifice for each other."

"It fucking _hurts._ It's not beautiful. She shouldn't have cut her hair. What did she _do_ that for? All of that sacrifice for _nothing._"

Kate sighed and turned her head towards him, her husband so agonized in the darkness, so frustrated. She reached out and caught his wrist, felt his pulse pounding hard there.

"Yeah, sweetheart," she murmured. "That's it exactly."

* * *

He felt the bump against the raft come again, furrowed his brow in the darkness. The river was so wide here, he couldn't imagine what was scraping below them.

"But I love that story," Kate murmured.

He glanced at her, sitting with her back against the prow of the raft, wedged tight because there wasn't a lot of space. He scraped a hand down his face and tried to sift the through the sharp edges of his thoughts.

"That story," he started. He couldn't think of what had to be said to fix this, to keep her from chopping off her hair before he even had a _chance_ to sell his damn watch. Maybe that was it - he didn't get to offer back to her the things she plunged headlong into. It made them unequal.

And then the raft shuddered with another nudge against the bottom.

Castle's heart stopped.

"That story is sad, but it's also beautiful. That's how I love, and I thought you understood. If you can't - if you don't-"

"Kate," he croaked. "Be quiet."

She stared at him, but the bump came again.

"Shit."

She sat up straight. "What - what was that?"

"Where's the rifle?" he hissed. "Beckett, get the fucking rifle and _hold on_-"

And even as he said it, scrambling for a handhold himself, a great monster lifted the raft out of the water and sent it flying. He heard Kate's scream and his own shout ripped from his chest, felt the churning of river and mud closing in around him. He landed hard on his back in water more shallow than he'd realized, and he groaned and tried to push off the bottom.

Something moved.

Castle's eyes burned, but he could only see shadows, darkness, the murky depths of the river. He swam towards the surface, searching for his machete at his thigh, and he felt the great beast brush past him, knocking him deeper underwater.

His lungs were screaming for air. Castle shoved away from the animal, using its broad back as a springboard, and he hurtled up out of the water, gasping. The darkness was black around him.

"Castle!"

"Get in the raft," he called back to her, choking on water. He stroked towards her, saw her arm tangled in the strap of the raft and hanging strangely. "Get back in the raft, Kate. Right now."

She was trying; fuck, she was trying. At least there was that. He pushed harder and swam for the raft with one arm, still trying to unsnap the harness that held the machete strapped to his leg.

"I'm up," she gasped, struggling now over the side. Beckett had reached for the automatic rifle and now she turned to him in the darkness with the weapon at her side. And then her eyes grew wide and shot-through with fear.

Fuck. It was behind him.

"Stay in the raft," he growled, and he yanked the machete out of its sheath.

"Castle. Oh God."

Just then, he found his footing in the shallows of the river and he turned.

It was a hippopotamus.

* * *

Oh, God.

Kate sighted the hippo in the rifle's scope and tried to breathe, and in that instant, Castle was dragged underwater by the weight of the charging beast.

"Castle!"

She lunged for the side and saw the thrashing below the surface, the bubble of exertion, and the fucking rifle was completely useless. Useless. God.

She grabbed one of the straps and jumped over the side again, sank the four feet down to the river bottom. They'd inadvertently been dragged into the shallows and now the hippo was churning the water - with her husband under it.

Beckett kept hold of the raft with one hand and tried to get closer, find _some way_ to help, and then Castle's body was thrown forcefully back, tangling with her, the air filled with splashing and snorting, the jaws opening wide.

She gasped, eyes stinging as the back of Castle's head met her jaw, and then she _heard_ the thing, the hippo, the furious sounds it made as it came back for them.

"Fuck," Castle croaked. "Fucking hell, Beckett. Get _out_ of here."

He staggered to his feet in the water and raised his arm, the machete gleaming, and he sliced open the wide nostril of the hippo. The beast bellowed and staggered back, blood flowing freely and darkly staining the water.

Beckett brought the rifle up but Castle knocked her back, yelling at her even as he was pushing her towards the shore. "Go, fucking, _go_, Kate. Let me sell the damn watch for once."

She gasped and fell back in the water, but Castle turned towards the hippo and slashed at it again. The beast shook its terrible head, jaws opening wide, and Castle yanked on the raft, dragging it between them and the hippo.

Kate slogged through the water, the gun heavy and useless against the thrash of beast and man. The hippo charged again, slammed into the raft with its full force, a great jet of water slamming over her and pushing her to her knees. The mouth slashed the plastic and churned their packs, and Castle was shoving on her, his arm wrapping around her waist and _dragging_ her up the bank.

"The raft!" she gasped, jerking as the strap caught her hand. "Stuck. Castle, I'm-"

Castle turned and slashed the strap clean through with a swipe of the machete, and then he hauled her off her feet and towards the river bank.

She heard the hippo slashing through the raft and coming after them.

* * *

"Beckett," he shouted back at her. "Beckett, come on."

He carried her with an arm slung at her waist, half-dragging her along, and he could hear the hippo behind them, charging, coming _fast._

"Beckett," he yelled again. "I need you to _move._"

He heard her just at his side, their legs tangling together as she tried to run, and his mind touched frantically on the strange angle of her arm as she'd hung from the raft. But there was no time.

The hippo came.

"Run, run," he gasped. "If you love me, damn it, you will _run._"

She moaned something and he scanned the bank of the river, searching for _something_ to help them. He headed for the steepest grade, tripping and stumbling over trees and underbrush that he hoped would slow the beast down as well. Hippos were made to charge in the shallows, with the water supporting their weight, and if he could just get them high enough-

He felt the rifle slung over her shoulder and knocking into his thigh as they ran. Make a stand and shoot at it, hope it got scared, hope it turned?

Fuck, they had no choice. They had _no_ choice.

"Give me the rifle," he rasped. "Give me the gun, Kate."

"I - my hand," she gasped. "I can't..."

He struggled up the rise of the river bank, used the trunk of a tree to swing them upwards. Another tree nearly cut off his head and he yelped, ducked them both to avoid it, wasting precious time. He crawled over a tangled growth of ferns and flowering plants, felt their petals dragging wetly at his face, but so much was in shadow, so much he couldn't see. The ground sucked at his feet, muddy and thin like gruel, made it difficult to climb.

Still the hippo came for them, crashing through the growth at the tree line, furious and bellowing.

The gun. Had to be the gun. And he still had the machete, against all odds, doing an ineffectual job hacking at the brush in front of them. He'd throw the machete first, distract the monster, and then open fire.

Beside him, Beckett tripped and went down to one knee, scrambled back up the next instant, but now the hippo was practically on top of them, coming up right at his heels.

With panic clutching at his heart, Castle spotted a twist of two trees snarled together, and he lifted Kate off her feet and wedged her between them. He turned on the spot, sliding his arm through hers and catching the rifle, brought the muzzle up into the deadly charge the hippo.

He heaved the machete at the river beast and it bellowed, opened its mouth, jaws wide.

"Castle," she groaned behind him. "No. No-"

And then the steep incline of the river bank gave way beneath the beast, mud and dirt and plants sliding, plunging the hippo down towards the water below.

* * *

Beckett grunted through the effort of climbing down, landed heavily at his side. The ground shifted beneath her feet and Castle reached out, grabbed her, hauled them both back a few paces.

"It floods," he said.

"What?" She was caked in mud and plant decay, sweating profusely through every pore. Her arm was hanging strangely, like meat at her side, numb and tingling, no feeling in her fingers.

"The river floods, the bank is loose, the tree roots are the only thing holding it together. And then you add four hundred pounds of hippo and..."

"Is it dead?"

"I think so. Not moving." He gave her a once-over and then nodded down the bank. "I'll see what's what."

"Castle," she said urgently, unable to even reach out and catch his arm. To just _stop_ him.

"Lay off, Beckett. I need to salvage what's left of our supplies, see about the raft."

She let out a shaky breath and closed her eyes. "You were just mauled by a hippopotamus. Can we not do this right now?"

"And _you _just jumped into the river _with it_, for fuck's sake. I'll do this whenever I damn well want to, because clearly you don't get it."

"What else was I supposed to do? Float like a moron in the raft? We're _partners._"

He grit his teeth and made a fist; she knew the next step was punching a tree and she didn't want to go there, not when her whole right side was achingly numb.

"Castle. Don't lose it," she said quietly. "Look, I understand that you don't want me risking my life-"

"It's not that," he yelled, bellowing just like the hippo. "You can fucking risk your life - we both do - every damn day of this job. But when risking your life is your go-to strategy for solving every problem, Kate Beckett, _that_ is when I fucking lose it."

She closed her mouth.

"So let me go check the raft, figure out what we can get out of it." He sighed heavily and scraped a hand down his face, and then he glanced back to her with sad eyes. "You coming, or what?"

His words so soft, so aching, and she wanted nothing more than to reach out and press her body into his.

"Um," she started, blinking quickly. "I - uh - I would. But my arm is..."

He turned abruptly and stared at her, concern rippling across his face. "Your arm?"

"It's - numb. I think it got caught when the raft was tossed. It's on the same side as the bruise on my neck."

His fingers traveled along her arm and came up to her neck, skimming through the sweat and mud, so light, so gentle. "It's probably a pinched nerve," he murmured. "We'll bind it and keep your shoulder in place. The feeling should come back soon."

She nodded, her guts churning. "I - I don't mean to."

"What?"

"I don't mean to risk my life first. As a problem solver. I don't - I don't think of it like that."

"Why'd you jump into the river when I _told _you to stay in the raft?"

"I couldn't make the gun - my arm was numb and I didn't think, Castle. I just reacted. You were... I don't even know how you weren't snapped in half."

"I dived towards his mouth, when he came for me. I dived and slid under his body, between his legs. Got stamped on pretty hard, but I managed to come up from behind. I got turned around though - it was dark, and then the side of his jaw smacked me backwards."

"Into me," she breathed, nodding. Her fingers were still numb but they burned with feeling now, aching painfully. "I thought I could be a diversion at least. Buy you some time."

"I don't like that idea," he muttered. "I can't say that I had the situation under control, but do you see how it's _worse_ for both of us when it's not just my life I'm fighting for? When I've got to worry about where you are and what's going on with you?"

"Can't we fight side by side?" she muttered. "Aren't we partners? Why don't you trust that I can hold my own?"

"Because you don't _hold_ your own, Kate. You throw yourself into the line of fire. If I thought you'd be logical about it, it would be fine. What happened to the woman I _met_? The one who did a roundhouse into the jaw of a Chinese spy while we were held at gunpoint? What happened to that partner?"

She let out a breath to say _you died_, but the tingling in her arm began to burn, agony flaring to life in her fingertips. "Can we - not do this right now? My... arm is killing me."

He cursed and stepped into her, a quick, rough embrace that made tears of pain burst behind her eyelids. "Sorry, I'm sorry. Let me sling your shoulder and carry you down."

Yeah. She could be okay with that.

* * *

He'd made a sling out of his own shirt, pressing her arm against her side so that her wrist was up at her chest. Not too tight, for circulation, but enough to keep each movement from jarring her.

And then he'd sort of carried her down the slope. Not really, but the grade was steep enough that as he'd climbed down ahead of her, she used his back as a prop, a way to keep from sliding. She was exhausted and aching and her heart hurt in ways she didn't know it could, but he kept reaching for her, checking on her, making sure she was... holding her own.

She was. She was holding her own. She'd prove it to him.

At the river bank, the hippopotamus was a massive black in the darkness of the jungle. She eased down beside Castle and sat on the half-rotted tree trunk he pointed out to her, let him approach alone.

"I think its spine snapped," he called to her. "Or the neck. He's thoroughly dead. Thank God."

"Thank God," she echoed. Her arm was beginning to tingle now, the nerve coming back alive.

Castle was investigating the hippo, nudging its rolls of thick skin and pushing on the legs and tail. Like a little boy in his backyard, poking at ants.

She winced and shifted her weight forward, stood up to hurry things along. "Can we just get our stuff and go?"

He turned on the river bank, water up to his shins where it trickled in through the low-lying grass, and he beamed a grin at her through the darkness. She could _see_ the gleam of his teeth and the silver in his blue eyes.

"Yeah, I'm going. I'm going. I've just never seen a bull up close."

"I'd rather not see another one," she muttered. "Don't they have territories and a herd?"

"Probably." He said it cheerfully, like he welcomed another chance at a hippo, and then he turned around and slogged through the water to get what was left of their raft.

She came forward slowly, watching his back as he dragged the green plastic towards the bank. The night was active, lots of creatures out there, but the river was relatively calm; still she scanned the water, wouldn't let down her defenses.

Castle dumped the raft at her feet and kicked the clump of plastic with his boot. "Well. It's trashed. Hippo sank his teeth in it."

She knelt down and picked up one end of the deflated raft, shook it out. "Yeah. What about our packs?"

"Waterproof, but not hippo-proof. Still, we have the tent in its case, some rations."

"Anything else?" she asked, hoping against hope.

"It's enough, Kate," he said quietly in the darkness. "Enough to get us there."

She sucked in a breath and bit her bottom lip. "We only have one more day," she whispered.

"I'll get us there. You need - _I _need the regimen." He his head nodded slowly. "I need the regimen. I know that, love. I'm - I'm still angry, and it hurts me that I don't know about you any more, if you'll throw yourself to the wolves - but I see it. I need the regimen if I hope to be strong enough to keep you alive. I need the regimen to make certain I can keep my promises to you. And so I'll get us there. Whatever it takes."

She let out her breath and stepped over the remains of the raft, directly into his chest. His arms came around her and avoided her bruised shoulder, his palm cradling the back of her head. His kiss was soft at her temple, probably the only skin left that wasn't caked in grime, and whatever he whispered into her hair was lost over the sounds of the river in the grass.

But she knew what he was saying. She slid her good arm around his waist and felt his knee shift between hers, holding her upright, and even though the dead hippo was a few feet away, the river and jungle crowding around them, it was better.

It was better.

It was going to be good again.


	5. Chapter 5

**Close Encounters 15: Never Say Never Again**

* * *

Castle watched her struggle ahead of him through the shallow end of the river. He wasn't crazy about staying so near the water's edge - the hippos liked to wallow - but that beast had attacked them in the raft itself, so it wasn't like they had viable options here. The jungle was too dense and they had only one more day left.

The starlight rippled over the water, made movement where none was, and he gripped the rifle tighter, keeping his eyes roving. Ahead of him, Beckett was hacking at the underbrush when it posed a problem to their path, using her good arm and keeping the numb one close to her chest.

"How's it?" he called out.

"Better," she said. She paused and glanced back at him, offered him a sharp smile that echoed the points of starlight above them - a little far away, distant, but illuminating nonetheless.

He nodded; he believed her. Not sure why, but he did. He couldn't seem to help it; maybe the regimen had kept him from sinking deep into other relationships, but something about Kate Beckett appealed to him on an innate, genetic level. As if he was geared to her in a way he couldn't break or deny.

Whatever it was, he saw she was able to maneuver in the ankle deep water along the bend of the river, keep them moving forward. But the stars reflected off the water and gave him enough light to see the tension in her shoulders and the way she held her arm, see the black edges of the bruise at her neck.

He didn't know what to do about that. He knew part of that tension was his fault, because he'd snapped at her, and so he cast his eyes around in vain, searching for some way to fix it.

"Beckett."

"Yeah." She didn't stop this time, just sank the machete into a snarled vine. It dropped away and she moved forward.

He didn't know why he'd called her name, only that he'd needed to hear her voice. He watched the liana vines falling before the machete and he saw the way she'd even started beheading the flowers, hapless and destructive. He reached down and picked up a brilliantly-flamed orchid, cupped it in his hand.

"Kate," he said, quieter this time.

She turned only a moment to look at him, her face pale in the starlight, the blade shining and slick with decimated plant life. He stepped up to her and tucked the green stem of the broken orchid into the strap of her tank top, his fingers brushing her injured shoulder.

Kate closed her eyes and opened them again. "What do you want from me?" she whispered.

"Tell me a story," he said finally, clearing his throat. He felt ridiculous but he needed it. Something. He believed her but he didn't. He thought she was doing okay, but the silence was breaking him.

"A story?" she said, turning back to the path she'd been making.

"Tell me how you got here," he said, taking a step into unsteady territory. She turned her face forward to watch where she was going, but he could feel her thinking about it.

"How I got here."

"To Tunis, out here - the jungle. In your own words, tell me the story," he said. He just wanted to understand. Had to.

"I don't know how to start," she admitted. The machete fell to her side and her feet stopped, but he didn't mean to have a sit down heart-to-heart; they needed to keep moving. Castle nudged her forward, keeping the automatic rifle pointed towards the river, his free hand at her hip.

"Start anywhere. It doesn't have to be the beginning. Just talk."

She hunched her shoulders as if with pain, but she was testing out her voice. "When I think about the beginning, I think about... identifying your bones, I think about sitting on the floor of your apartment. Nowhere to go, no place for me, no home of my own but a bare CIA safe house. Where you used to be."

He felt his finger tighten on the trigger and had to remind himself to ease up, to be here and not there.

"But you weren't there," she said softly. "And I was. That's where this starts, Castle. Alone without you. And I don't want to end there. So."

So.

Here they were. Chasing after a man who wanted to kill her because she needed him not to die again.

The night was dark but he'd salvaged both their packs, including the tent and most of their provisions, so if they had to travel another two days before they caught up to Black, then they'd be okay. He'd call for an extraction team the moment they had what they needed.

"You probably didn't want to hear that," she said.

"Probably," he admitted. "But I needed to hear it."

She hacked at an unoffensive wave of river grass near the edge; he watched her and didn't offer more. The orchid trembled at her shoulder.

"And I guess there's... lying awake at night to make sure you're still breathing. There's reaching out my hand to hover over your lips to feel the air coming out and going in. And then curling my fingers around your wrist to feel your pulse, every beat, every beat, needing to remind myself you're alive, that a stupid _cold_ wasn't going to take you from me."

Castle reached out and found her neck, the unmarred column of her throat, and he wrapped his own fingers around that beating pulse, felt it drumming hard and fast and frightened.

Not of him. But maybe of what he'd do next.

They had made excellent time today, swept along by the fast-moving current, and when he had checked the phone's link to the GPS tracker, they weren't far behind his father's signal.

If they kept going at this pace, they'd arrive right before sunrise.

Castle squeezed her neck and reached back for the satellite phone once more. He called up the GPS and felt Beckett lean in close to him. When the map resolved, his father's signal was still stationary - as it had been two hours ago. They were closer than ever.

Castle wasn't sure what he wanted more - to finally come across Black with the element of surprise on Castle's side, or to drag his feet and slow them down, keep his wife away from the man and check out the place once his father was gone.

"Kate," he said quietly. Time to make a decision. "We can arrive at these coordinates at approximately four in the morning, still dark. Or we rest up now, take the chance he's still there after a few hours' sleep."

She wouldn't lift her head to look at him; her gaze was on the map. He already knew what her answer would be.

"Let's keep going. I don't want to take my chances with Black."

Good point.

"Lead on, then."

* * *

"I have a story too."

Beckett took a tight breath in and manned up, grabbed her courage in both fists to turn around and look at him. Or well, one fist anyway. Her fingers were still burning with the slowly-returning sensation and she kept her arm close to her chest.

The orchid brushed her cheek when she turned her head.

"My story starts in a cemetery," he told her.

"Shit," she sighed.

"Yeah. It was a shitty day," he agreed easily. "You jumped in front of a bullet for me."

"I wasn't actually trying to get myself shot. You do know that, right? I was just trying to shove you out of the way."

"Yeah. But then I held you in the grass and watched your blood leave your body and there was absolutely nothing I could do to keep you here."

"Fuck," she muttered. Her eyes were burning. It was the damn stench of chlorophyll as she hacked at the vegetation growing too thickly along the river bank; it was allergies from the stupid flower up near her face. "Castle."

"Everything felt pretty fucked," he said. "Everything. Gone just like that. And then when I thought it was better because at least you were alive, I couldn't seem to do anything right for you."

"We've gone over this," she growled. "How many years of therapy?"

"And yet here we are."

She sighed, tried to keep from grinding her teeth in frustration.

"And then Russia," he muttered.

"Okay," she breathed out. Slow, long breath back in. "Okay, Russia. We haven't... talked much. But that was bad."

"That was bad," he echoed. "Kate, that was impossible. Not knowing. But knowing enough to be afraid."

"The wolf," she sighed. Friend or foe. Enemy and angel. She had no idea, she'd been hallucinating from malnutrition as well, and then the wolf had been shot. She'd lost it - the last of her strength, her hope, and she'd thought for sure she was going to die.

"And then I found you unconscious in a cave and you couldn't even eat. You couldn't open your eyes or squeeze my hand. You were freezing cold and you were _crying_."

She breathed through that too, memory and remembrance both, his and hers both, not sure when this story had turned into a gauntlet-run.

"Our life sucks lately," he gruffed.

She laughed, choking with it. "Yeah, baby, it does."

"But soon?"

"We're gonna get better at this," she promised.

"I'm super again, so."

"And you'll stay that way," she added, heard the heat in her own voice. "If we manage to get the rest of it."

"We will." His hand came out again and squeezed her neck, but he dragged her into him and kissed her cheek. "We go in, get the last of the regimen, and then I fucking kill him. Like I should have before."

She shivered.

She wasn't sure that was such a great idea.

* * *

Kate was tilting her head back and opening her mouth, letting the rain fill her up. The monsoon season was a bitch, and it was drowning them like rats, but she didn't seem to care.

It was getting better, he knew. Castle watched her a moment and shook his head, reached out and curled his fingers around a snarl in her hair. She sputtered through rain and laughed, turned to look at him with a grin.

He squeezed water out of the lock of her hair, dug his fingers deeper to pull her against his chest. She stumbled but came to him, the material of her wet shirt sticking to his own. He kissed her hard, sucking rain drops from her lips, tasting the jungle in her mouth. She shivered and her fingers fisted in shirt, her teeth scraping.

Castle groaned, wanting her, wanting to reconnect with her, to fix everything again, forever. She'd lied to him, she'd betrayed him, she'd gone behind his back to make fucked up deals with his father, but she loved him. They were complicit in this.

It rained and rained and he kissed her, devoured her. It rained and the water came up to his knees, soaking him to the skin, the whole night drenched and wet, and her body hot against his.

The orchid was crushed and it fell to the river and swirled away.

She moaned his name and clawed at his back, trying to get closer, so alive under his hands. He drank from her, everything she gave because she always gave everything - everything - to him and he wasn't going to waste it, not a drop.

He'd never take her for granted again. Never.

"I love you, Kate," he said, cupping her face in his hands. He had to raise his voice over the sound of the water coming down, had to shout to make himself heard. "I love you, and if this is what it takes, then this is what it takes. You just - you gotta meet me halfway in this, sweetheart. I can't do it without you."

"I promise," she said. Her words were gulped down, her face filled with rain like tears. "I promise. We do this together. All of it. Always together."

The rain beat down on them, oppressive and formidable, but he gripped her tightly and wouldn't let go.

* * *

They trudged through the water, hand-in-hand, Castle helping her over the worst of it when it seemed like the weight of rain was going to hold her back. She was struggling, but she was struggling forward, and at times she was gripping his shirt as she climbed over a fallen tree, other times it was him helping her balance on the tight-rope of a trunk bridging one swamp to another.

"It's pouring," she yelled.

"Cats and dogs," he said. The monsoon hadn't let up for the last thirty minutes and at first he'd wanted to wait until it let up, but they couldn't wait that long. He wanted to get to Black's place while it was still full dark.

The roar of the river was at his left, tumultuous with the water suddenly rushing its banks, and he maneuvered them to still-higher ground. The bank was shifting, weakened by the deluge, and it was difficult to navigate. Fallen trees and underbrush, the natural decay of the forest floor, the overhang of the canopy weighted down by water, the mud.

He slogged through a depression, felt his boots sink. And sink.

And keep sinking.

He grimaced and her hand tightened on his shirt, her fist hard at his spine. He waited, made sure she had her balance, and then he turned around and gripped her by the waist.

"What?"

"Give me a second. Let me carry you over."

"Carry me?"

He heft her up, felt himself sink farther, the mud sucking at his knees now.

"Um. Castle."

"Yeah?" he said, glancing up at her.

"Baby, you're sinking."

"Yeah."

She wiped the hair out of her face and he planted her on fallen log just past the area of mud and clay that had trapped him.

"Castle."

"Quicksand, love."

She stooped on her haunches on the fallen tree just above them, water still streaming down the slope and towards the river. "Stop moving."

"I know." He quirked his lips at her.

"You can float if you're careful," she said. "And I'll pull you towards solid ground."

"Babe," he laughed. "It's not that bad."

She held out her hands to him and he grinned, took her palms with his in a firm grip. Castle let her guide him slowly towards the thick, human-sized tree she was perched on, grateful to see how calm she was, in control. This was the Beckett he ran missions with, the agent he'd trained; not doing stupid things like throwing herself into the bog with him.

He shifted, got a knee up onto the trunk beside her, and she helped him up. It took less than five minutes and the mud was already being slung right off of him by the still-falling rain. He had to blink and swipe water from his eyes, over and over, scraping the mud off on the tree trunk.

Kate stood up from her crouch and looked past his shoulder, gasping. "Castle. Shit."

The rain was heavier than he'd initially estimated, streaming down his face and making it hard to see his own hand in front of him, but he could see her fear. The monsoon was relentless, and he glanced back down at the river behind them.

He cursed and stood up fast, grabbed her by the elbow. "Let's go."

The water was rising fast.

* * *

Lightning crashed into the world.

She knew he'd wanted to stop, but at the moment when she'd thought maybe he was right and that they should hole up for a while, it'd begun to crack open the sky with electricity. The lightning forked and licked, split into trees and across the river itself, making every step treacherous.

She was trying to be aware of the terrain, looking for more quicksand, but it was impossible to tell. Twice more Castle carried her across what seemed to be loose areas of the sloping bank, trying to move to higher ground.

"Climb here," he yelled up at her.

She glanced over her head and saw the gnarled buttress roots exposed in the slope, lifted an arm to grab for the one closest. She couldn't quite reach, her shoulder throbbing, and even though the sound of the river and the rain was enough to roar through her ears, Castle must have heard her grunt of exertion.

His hands came to her hips, thumbs just below her ass, and he lifted her straight up. She gasped and swayed, but he had her steady, perfectly balanced, strong as an ox. Kate tossed him a look over her shoulder for that but he wasn't grinning any longer.

She grabbed the root, clambered up the slope with Castle right on her heels. She grimaced at the twinge in her shoulder, but he was pushing on her from behind, shoving her upwards.

"Faster, Kate."

"Why? What's-"

And the she heard it, the roar of water, furious and oncoming, sucking at trees and growth like a beast. She took a quick look past Castle's shoulder and saw the torrent of water heading for them.

The river was fast.

She climbed.

Ignoring the pain in her shoulder, the scream of her pinched nerves, Beckett scaled the slope, using roots and limbs, sometimes Castle's own shoulder as a stepping stone, going up and up, finding herself sliding back with every other handhold. The mud was sloughing off right in front of her face, gravity pulling it back down towards the water below, the monsoon causing the whole bank to fall.

"Beckett," he shouted. "Move."

"Trying," she growled back.

"Higher. Go higher. See if you can get to the crest of the bank. Climb over."

She could hear the water, the insistent roar and fury, and then lightning flashed in her eyes, directly at her head.

"Beckett!"

She felt the numbness in her hands first, and then the shock of that electricity zipping through her bones. Castle was on her next, grabbing her, and she realized she was falling.

But he'd stopped her.

Her momentum swung her back around into the slope, her face scraping a root, but she grabbed what she could, fingers clutching. Castle was a wall at her back, pressing her hard into the slope, and she felt the warm mud against her cheek.

"I got you, I got you," he was chanting. "I got you, sweetheart."

She blinked and shivered, reached a slow hand up for the root just above their heads but her fingers were slow to work.

"Breathe, baby. You gotta breathe."

She nodded, sucked in a breath she didn't know she'd been holding.

"There you go, there you go."

"I'm okay," she croaked out. "I'm good."

Another flash of lightning had her blinded, both of them jerking in response, and his body pressed into hers again, keeping her against the side of the slope. She heard a sudden roaring in her ears, a surge that made her heart beat too fast, and she wondered if she'd been electrocuted.

"Shit," he croaked.

The roar was enormous, everywhere, filling her head with noise. She couldn't _see_, couldn't seem to breathe around it; the mud caked her face and clung to her body.

"Beckett. Climb. Tree. We need to climb the tree. Right now."

Tree? "Can't see-"

She felt his shoulder come under her feet, his hand at her ass; he shoved her up and to the right, wrenching her painfully, practically throwing her so that her shoulder hit a branch and she reacted, clinging.

She hauled herself into the tree, her vision clearing as the after-effects of the lightning faded. She lifted her head to get a look at her tree and saw the massive wall of water coming _down_ the slope.

"Castle!" He was on the bank; he was standing right in the path of all that water.

His eyes met hers with a fierceness that made her heart go cold. "Hold. On. Don't you fucking let go."

And then the wall of water crashed past her, swept over him, and he was gone.


	6. Chapter 6

**Close Encounters 15**

* * *

Beckett gasped as the wall of water sucked at her, clawing at her body, trying to pry her away from the tree. She hung on so tightly that her shoulders were screaming with every tearing wrench, her arms locked around the trunk.

She tried to see past the flood, the overwhelming rain stinging her eyes, but there was nothing. Nothing but water, an intense amount of water.

She didn't see Castle anywhere. Not even a sign of him, not the flag of his black backpack, not the pale moon of his face in the darkness.

Only the flood.

The water was high, so high, licking at her stomach and soaking her breasts now, thunderous and roaring. She tried to wrap her legs around the tree but the force of the water dragged her off, made her arms shake with exertion.

Castle.

He'd told her to not let go but she might be carried away. He would be _so_ pissed at her.

Kate pressed her face to the wet bark and growled in her frustration, tried to draw a knee around the trunk of the tree. She couldn't let go; she couldn't let go.

If she could just hang on long enough, she could wade through some of this. Or maybe she could climb upwards, reach the top of the bank and higher ground. She needed to find him; she had to find Castle. He'd just been sucked under by a damn _flood_; she had to find him.

Oh, God, this was all her fault. She was the reason they were here.

Beckett groaned as the water roared, filling up her senses and dragging at her body. Her elbows ached, her shoulders; she still felt light-headed from the lightning strike, not sure if she'd been zapped or if she'd been in close proximity.

Castle. Castle. He was out there. She _had_ to get clear of the water. Had to fucking _force_ her body up and over the bank, no matter what.

But he told her not to let go; _don't let go._ She could barely cling to the tree, let alone move-

And then the water fell suddenly.

The powerful surge let her go, dropping her hard against the tree, bruising her ribs and knees. Her fingers were cramped around the branch, no foothold for her shoes, and her shoulders burned with agony.

She was going to fall. Fuck. After all this, she was going to fall.

Beckett bit back a moan and dug the toes of her shoes into the trunk of the water-softened tree, tried to find purchase. Her hands were slipping, scraping against the bark now, shredding her already-raw palms, and she grunted as she slipped another inch.

She needed traction. She had to - there was more than thirty feet between her and the bottom; the slope of the bank was a hard fall to the river below. She had to climb up, had to climb the fucking tree so she could _find-_

Arms wrapped around her legs and she shouted in surprise, falling only to be caught.

Wet, hard, hot.

"Castle?" she gasped, twisting in his arms.

"I got you, Kate. Oof. Stop moving, baby. Precarious footing here."

She stopped struggling, let him lower her to another branch, felt his body at her back. His arms were so taut, so strong, and she sucked in a breath, relieved, blinking through the still-falling rain.

"Got your feet?" he murmured.

She nodded and turned slowly in the crook of the tree, wrapped her arm around his neck to hold him against her.

"I thought you were gone," she whispered, her forehead dropping to his shoulder. "I thought you were lost."

"I'm not lost, sweetheart." His kiss was soft at her temple. "Not at all."

She clutched him tighter, gulping down her rising relief. Tears would do her no good, not when she was already soaked through.

"I love you," she said into his throat, her nose warmed by his skin. "I'm sorry."

"I know you are. I know. I love you too."

* * *

He'd found a forked tree close enough to the one he'd catapulted her into, saw her dangling by her fingertips. He'd scaled the tree so fast she must not have even heard him coming, because when he grabbed her, he'd felt that shock jolt through her.

This was much better, his feet dangling over the slope as he sat in the crook of the tree with Kate in his lap. Castle had an arm around one of her legs, both of them facing each other and propped up with a limb at their backs. He reached out and cradled her hand between his, studying her palm.

"Looks bad, Kate."

"Hurts," she said, shrugging at him. Her eyes were scanning the horizon, or what could be seen from their tree house - mostly lightning and the monsoon roaring around them.

"The tree?"

"And everything," she added, turning her head now and looking at him. There was pain around her eyes. "I think - the lightning, actually. It hurts a lot, Castle."

"Yeah, sweetheart, looks like." Maybe burned, too, he couldn't tell.

"How'd you get back here so fast?" she said then, her frown deepening on her forehead.

He didn't answer right away, concentrated instead on her injuries. Her fingers curled up and he straightened them again, used his body to block her hand from the rain. He'd plucked aloe straight from the side of the bank and now he squeezed the juice from the leaf out over her bloodied palm, dabbed it lightly to keep from hurting her.

"Castle," she said. "How'd you get back here so fast?"

He told her the story to distract her from his crappy first aid; they'd lost the kit when the raft had been attacked. "Got slammed into a tree just down the slope, caught hold of it. Climbed up."

"Against the weight of all that water?"

"Super spy, baby. You should know."

She dropped her chin, her wet hair sliding forward to hide her eyes. Castle let go of her hand and reached up, tucked her hair behind her ear. Her lashes were thick with drops of water, her cheeks smeared with dirt. He wished...

So many things.

"I'm pretty strong, Kate. I've got a lot I can do, a lot of information in my head thanks to the training. The regimen. It's not just the pills, you know. Or just the injections. It's the whole combination - the drills, the routines, the diet, the plan. He did that to me, but it makes me into the man who can - who will always - come back to you. That's why I can make that promise."

Her eyes lifted to his, dark and clear even in the middle of a long night. He saw suddenly that until now she hadn't quite believed him; she'd wanted to, but how could she?

She'd told him herself, every day of that first year together, that she didn't trust, she wasn't built for this. But he was, and he'd assumed it would be enough.

That it would carry them through.

"I know you will," she said slowly. "I know."

"You do now, right?" He stopped staring at her to wrap her hand in the moderately-dry, torn-off sleeve of his shirt. "You see what I can do, what I'm capable of. I haven't spent my _whole life_ in the service getting by on luck."

"I know," she said again. Her other hand came to his wrist and circled the knot of scars. "I see now."

He let out a careful breath, felt the electricity of her fingers against his skin.

He finished wrapping her hand with a twist of the cotton, tucked it up under the edge like a cuff. She flexed her hand and closed it up, her other hand wrapped around his forearm.

She turned her head away, scanning the jungle once more, her face in profile. "I know now," she said to him, her voice strong even over the sound of water. "I know what you can do."

"It's not what _I_ can do, Kate. It's what we can do together. Remember?"

Her face turned back to him and her smile lit up the whole night.

"Yeah," she rasped. Her head tilted and her eyes were beautiful, caressing his face. "Together."

He could breathe again, felt himself smiling back at her. "We sit here until we can hike in the rest of the way, until the lightning is gone. Okay?"

"Deal." Her smile faltered and her bottom lip tucked into her teeth. "But we need to talk about the plan."

His heart dropped. "Oh?"

"You said you'd listen if I talked, if I chose a different way. You said there were better ways, Castle."

"There are," he said slowly, dread rising in him. "I'm listening."

"You can't kill your father."

* * *

"I'm not listening to this."

Beckett carried nothing but her mangled hands, keeping them close to her stomach to avoid the vines and undergrowth that seemed to reach out for them as they hiked. "You said you would."

"I can't believe you want to let him _live_."

She curled her fingers into her palms and let out a breath. "You said you'd hear me out. You said there were other ways - other than my neck to a knife."

"That's not even funny," he growled, reaching back to grab her by the arm. He hauled her up and over a fallen log, giving her the balance she needed to make it, but he wasn't ignoring her. He wasn't totally shutting her down.

"It's not funny at all," she said. "Castle, I can count on two things in my life. Two things only. You love me and your father will do anything to save your life."

"You're wrong," he said, his fingers practically bruising. "I do love you, but he's not interested in my life. What he's interested in is _his_ life - the life he intended for me. And Kate, if you can't see how those are two completely opposite things-"

"No, I know that. I know. Shit, when he grabbed you, I panicked. Because I knew what he'd do to you." She wished her hands weren't so raw; she'd reach out for him, reestablish that connection. Instead, he turned to her and lifted her bodily over a tangle of vines, his frustration radiating out of him like heat.

He was still looking at her though, still talking to her. He wasn't dismissing her out of hand.

"He has the regimen," she said. "And even if we get his stash here - wherever here is - there are still so many things that might go wrong with it. So many variables we can't account for."

He was silent beside her, but she felt it as a thinking silence. The rain had stopped and they no longer seemed to be chasing after the storm either; the jungle was alive with night noises and dripping water, huge leaves bowed under the weight of the fresh rain.

"Kate," he said finally. "I have to be honest with you. When I was at Stone Farm this last time, Dr Threkeld indicated that I might run into some problems later on. The serum alone is unstable - the pills are apparently preventative. They keep my cells from warping too far the wrong direction."

Kate swallowed and tried to keep moving, keep going, push forward. She was running on adrenaline and pain, for the most part, and hearing that Castle might - that something was vitally _wrong_ with him - was like cutting her off at the knees.

"Hey," he said, fingers leaving her arm and shifting to squeeze her neck. "I'm okay when I have the pills. Black gave me a complete dose on the island anyway, so that's fixed. It's only if I have the serum alone - like when I got sick."

She flexed her fingers and carefully threaded her feet through the underbrush. "He gave you a complete dose but... everything else, Castle. There's still so much we don't know about this, about how it works and how it affects your body's chemistry. I mean, we don't even know how _often_ you ought to take the regimen to maintain your - superness. Your father has spent a lifetime perfecting this research and he has those answers."

"But that's not to say that someone else can't _find_ those answers, Kate. That's what all those tests were for at Stone Farm, remember? Like, for example, I'm supposed to have a lot higher level lipoproteins - that's what Threkeld told me. That's part of an answer."

"What?" she said, glancing over at him. "Lipoproteins."

"And thinking back, Black was always giving me these high-protein diets. I just didn't question it at the time, didn't ask why - it was just part of the program."

She rubbed two fingers against her forehead. "Okay. Well. I just don't want to kill the one person who does have those answers, Castle. Lipoproteins is a good start, but-"

"And Boyd and Threkeld and Logan - they're assembling a team to reverse engineer the regimen. They said the moment we get it, they'll start to work."

It helped; it did. But Threkeld and Boyd had no idea all the nuances that had gone into creating this regimen; they hadn't catered these pills and injections to fit one man's needs. They hadn't been with him since he was five years old.

"Your father has been there for everything, Rick. He knows every mistake he made, every serum that worked. He knows your full medical history, sweetheart - in ways no one else ever could. We don't have time to find answers when something like pneumonia can bring you down so quickly."

Castle suddenly stopped her with a grip of his fingers at her arm, her body stumbling into his as momentum carried her forward. She looked up into his face and saw the bleakness weighing down his eyes.

"I know," she murmured, turning her head. "I know. I don't want it for you. Oh, God, Castle, I'd give anything to make it not be-"

"Stop," he rasped. "Stop. Just..." He shook his head, fingers tightening. "It's not just me and him. I'd suffer through it - have before. It's - what happens to you? If he's still around. I'm scared to death that one day I'll slip, I won't be there in time, and he'll have... hurt you."

Kate shouldered her way into him, her arms curled at his sides but unable to touch. His arms went around her roughly, his cheek to the top of her head, and she could feel the wild clutch of his heart in the darkness of the rainforest.

But still. "We don't know what's been done to you, baby, and until we find those answers, until we have a full research lab with all of his notes from the last forty years of your life... we can't kill him. We need him."

"We don't need him," he rumbled, lifting up to shake his head at her. "You want guarantees in a life that's filled with unknowns."

"I want insurance," she said back. "I _know_ what happens without you. You put me there, you gave me that knowledge when you pretended you were dead. That's not an unknown for me."

He still looked like he was going to deny her, like in the end all her talking would be for nothing. And even though she had done something terrible to him, even though she was on thin ice as it was, she couldn't help asking for it.

"What happens when I get pregnant and our son carries these same misshapen red blood cells? What happens when _he_ falls to a super bug? We inject him too and hope it works the same? Or do we have a back-up plan here, Castle? Someone to go to, to _beat_ those answers out of if we have to."

She watched what it did to him, the way it sucked the life out of him, the way it crushed him.

Well, it crushed her too. Whatever family they might have - it began and ended with _him_, her husband, and if he couldn't understand that, then... she didn't know what happened next. She didn't know how they got past that.

Castle scraped a hand down his face and paced away from her, but she hoped - she thought he was at least still listening.

"You owe me this, Rick. You want a life with me? You want to make those dreams _real_? Well, I want a life with you too. And this is how we keep it. This makes that life viable for us. We make it happen, but the regimen _keeps_ it."

She watched his shoulders hunch but still he was so deadly quiet, so silent. She waited, listening to the last of the raindrops showering from the canopy overhead, couldn't quite forget what a mess she was at this moment and yet still asking for the impossible from him.

She couldn't even touch him, couldn't seduce him, couldn't sway him to her side like she usually did. She had no means to make him understand her except for her words.

And those had never worked.

Castle turned around finally, his jaw set. He reached out for her and took her by the arm, started them moving forward again.

"All right, Beckett," he said. His voice was determined. "He lives. That's a promise."

* * *

Castle refrained from insisting that she ride piggy-back - barely - and that was mostly because she'd be furious at him for thinking she was that bad off. But it was also because part of him shied away from anything having to do with their time in Russia.

Still, he watched her carefully as they traversed the top of the riverbank, watching where she put her feet and how she moved, making certain she had her balance and that the pain wasn't too much. She had an awkward gait now that she couldn't use her hands very well, but instead of that defensive posture she'd held before, hands curled up at her chest, her arms were at her sides again.

Progress. She seemed to be relatively okay, all things considered.

"Hey, can you keep up with the tracking?" he asked, holding out the phone to her. "You have a better sense of accuracy when it comes to directions and I want my hands free."

He saw her fingers flex but she nodded and took it from him, cradling it, but no pain flashed on her face. The burns were minor, despite the lightning storm, and the rawness in her hands would be sensitive, but she could function. She was more than functioning, she was pretty damn resilient.

He had the regimen - what did she have?

Some serious determination. He couldn't underestimate her - he wouldn't.

"We're bearing a little too far north," she called to him. "Can you find a way for us to get back down to the river?"

"That's the problem," he admitted. "It's not safe. Hippos and flash floods. We stick to higher ground for as long as we can."

"Then... we need to go along here," she said, coming up at his shoulder and showing him the map. The red dot of the GPS implant showed brightly in the darkness, the screen illuminated in faint grey and black. His father had landed and had stayed in that one location for the last few days. He'd either found the tracker and ditched it (but Castle didn't think that was possible), or he'd holed up behind walls.

"Yeah, I can do that," he said, studying the map.

"It's a straighter shot," she said. "And we're low on supplies now. Plus, you see this area? It's relatively clear here. If he had to, it's an extraction point. Or he landed the plane there - maybe."

"Yeah, okay. Chopper could make that landing for sure. If we're fast enough in there, we can arrange Mitch to send a pilot for us."

"I don't plan on... making this into a stand-off," she said. Her feet slowed as she talked, but Castle gripped her arm and propelled her forward. "Castle? I want to avoid your father altogether."

"All right. But you know that might not be possible. The accuracy for this thing - it's within twenty feet."

"Better than a city block," she said.

"True. What I'm saying is - might not be able to miss him." She gave him a troubled look and he shook his head. "Promise holds, Kate. I won't kill him. I won't - he'll survive this encounter."

She squared her shoulders, face straight ahead. "I want us to survive too. More than that - I'm not looking to be stupid again."

That went through him so fast he nearly fell to his knees, the tension melting straight out of his body like water going down a drain. "Yeah. Good. I - yeah." He swayed a little and stared back down at the map to give him time to recover.

"So when we find this place - wherever it is he's gone to roost - we'll do recon, be smart about it," she added.

"Yeah," he agreed, still stuck on _not looking to be stupid again_. He'd needed that promise as much as she'd needed his. "We'll scope it out, see what's weak, and we'll enter quietly. We'll do our best to go unnoticed and get out quietly."

"We get whatever we can find in there," she said. "There's no guarantee the pills are there, but it sounded to me like your father is collecting all of his pieces in a bid for you. Dangling a carrot while he wields the stick."

"He's gotten it mixed up though," Castle answered, easing his grip on her arm, mindful again of those bruises along her neck. "You're the carrot, sweetheart. Do anything for you."

She shot him a look that he couldn't interpret. "I think he's got that pretty well figured out, super spy. That's how he gets us."

And she wanted to let Black _live_. How stupid could they be?

It was going to come back to bite them. It was only a matter of time.

* * *

"We're here," she breathed at his ear. He felt her sliding the phone back into his hands and he nodded, curling his palm around the screen so it wouldn't flare in the darkness.

He checked the map and then glanced back up to the perimeter wall before them. No doubt about it.

They were here.

The concrete wall was grey and green, a mosaic of shades that effectively camouflaged its heavy defenses. A quick recon showed three feet of barbed wire at the top, loops of razor wire above that. Cameras mounted every few paces, more cameras than were optimal for a secure installation.

Someone paranoid. Someone who'd been a CIA ghost a long time.

But the equipment was _old_; at least twenty years old, and maybe more. It would simple to bypass the cameras, though their sudden darkness might rouse suspicion.

"It's here," she murmured. He nodded back. Not just his father's rat's nest, but the regimen. Heavily fortified, massive security, and all for an anachronistic installation built probably fifty years ago or more - had to be here.

"A few cases of those pills," he said softly, "and it was an entire listening station buried on an island. This place? This is serious shit. It's more than just a couple cases behind that wall."

He felt her press against his side, felt her relief and... excitement? Yeah, he thought maybe it _was. _And if he were honest, he could feel his blood rushing through his veins, the adrenaline building.

He was made for the mission.

Literally.

"Let's double back, come at this place from the south," he said softly. He felt her nudge against his shoulder in confirmation, and then she was slipping away, through the underbrush, quieter than he expected.

Yeah, this was going to be fun.

If it didn't kill them.


	7. Chapter 7

**Close Encounters 15**

* * *

Beckett noted the position of the cameras on the satellite phone's overlay, passed it back to Castle who crouched behind her. He took it, tapped her shoulder blade in acceptance, and handed it to her once more.

She slithered on through the dense jungle, moving quietly, the pain in her hands already a far and distant white noise. The job overcame all - it had always been this way. Focus on the job. They had a fairly detailed map of the outside of the compound, and thanks to a few trees, a basic schematic of the building these walls protected.

Low concrete and rusted metal, fifties-era architecture, with thin windows set at ground-level which Beckett had guessed meant a basement.

Castle stopped her with a tug on her pants and she turned back to him. He gestured to the tree beside them and she nodded, held the machete lightly in one hand and took the automatic rifle from him with the other.

He scaled the thin trunk quickly; it swayed under his weight but so did many of the trees in this area. Monkeys or pythons, hornbills or a spy, didn't matter, these trees withstood it all. Beckett waited below, scanning the perimeter for any of those animals, flexing her fingers on the grip of the rifle, watching for guards.

Sweat rolled down her neck and slipped between her breasts. Her breath came in shallow spurts, more adrenaline than anything else, but she could feel the bruise at her neck now, the tender muscles and the tension that put knots down her spine.

She was going to hurt for a long time after this.

She heard Castle scrambling down quickly and she glanced upward, watched him descend. He dropped the last few feet, crouching, and then grabbed her by the arm, hauled her ahead of him.

"Go, go, go," he hissed.

She went, moving as swiftly as she dared, trying not to trip over roots or tangled growth. Everything on the forest floor was thin and reedy, searching for light, or broad and expansive, taking over, and it meant she couldn't accurately judge depth or consistency. Each plant was a trap, and she kept putting her feet wrong.

"Guards on the perimeter wall," he said then, explaining even as he hustled her farther away. She handed him the rifle and he slung it over his shoulder, guiding her westward in a long loop around the far edge of the compound.

"See anything?" she asked.

"Yeah," he answered. He gave a last look back over his shoulder and then headed for a massive, gnarled tree. "Up this. Hurry."

"Guards outside the wall?" she questioned. She hadn't heard a soul, but he'd been high up.

"Yeah. Four. Can you climb?"

She glanced upward helplessly, a strange rush of bleakness washing through her. "No. I can't." She held up her hands and showed him her palms, the blood spotting the bandages he'd made. "Already pushed it."

He shifted into her, some kind of unconscious, protective movement, but he put a boot to the base of the tree and his hands on her hips. "I'm sorry, but you have to. I don't think we can lose them in the jungle."

"Did we miss a camera?" she asked. She felt him boosting her up and she gritted her teeth, slapped her hand against the lowest branch to torque her body upwards.

Castle held most of her weight though, kept the pressure off her hands. "We must have tripped a perimeter alarm. They're doing a careful grid search, about five klicks away."

"Could be an animal," she said, grunting as her hand burned against the tree. With his help she perched on the lowest limb, felt him coming up behind her. "Right? It doesn't have to be us."

"Right. They don't know what they're looking for - only that they're looking. Their search pattern was sloppy, so I'm guessing gorillas or rock pythons trip it often enough."

Right, the rock python which could grow up to sixteen feet and swallowed crocodiles whole.

But at least she hadn't missed a camera. That would've ruined the element of surprise - which was probably the only thing going for them. If Black saw their faces on a monitor somewhere, he would have no doubt he'd been tracked. And good luck ever getting the regimen then.

"Higher, love, if you can."

She let out a breath and wrapped her arm around a branch above her, moved slowly to let her weight hang from it. Her hands were throbbing again. Castle got a shoulder under her ass and eased the transition, and she finally managed to hook her leg around the branch and haul herself onto the next limb.

He was right behind her. She glanced downward and realized they were barely off the ground. "We'll have to go higher," she said. "Where is the security team?"

Castle sighed. "Yeah. One more limb. You okay?"

"I'll survive," she said grimly. The next limb was nearly at her shoulder as she stood upright, which made it easier, and she dug her elbow into the branch instead of her hands. Castle gave her a boost and she scrambled up, gasping now, heart thundering, her palms bleeding again.

"This should be fine," he said. "Stay."

It wasn't as high as she would like, but the next limb was even farther over their heads. She wasn't sure she'd be able to scale it even if her hands weren't killing her. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry," he said quietly. "Hand me the phone. I'll see if I can't use the app to zoom in."

She carefully dug into her pocket and gave him back the phone. He shifted on the branch and she felt it dip under her with his weight. Beckett scooted back, let her head lean against the trunk, her legs straddling the limb to keep herself steady. Castle was standing up, one hand above his head to hold on to the branch, the other with the phone taking scout photos.

He sank back down beside her and showed her the images.

"Moving slowly," she said.

"Think so. They're not being careful though. Thorough enough - but lazy." Castle pocketed the phone and then checked the straps of the harness, adjusting them around the machete. "We'll hang here for a little longer. Sky is getting lighter - sun will rise soon."

She glanced to the east and saw he was right; she hadn't even noticed the creeping green in the corners, the tinge of blue to the blackness like a finally-healing bruise.

"I wish we had the cover of darkness for this," she murmured.

"It can take as long as it takes," Castle cautioned her.

"No," she sighed, tilting her head back against the tree. "It can't. You were right. We have limited supplies and we've already been out here for three days. We don't even have the food to hike it back through the jungle to the Cessna."

"I didn't expect us to. We can figure something out."

She closed her eyes for a moment, battling at the urge to be reckless, to gamble her life when his was on the line. She couldn't do that to him; he'd promised to keep Black alive and she'd promised to _try_ to be reasonable.

Problem was - she didn't always know she wasn't being reasonable.

"We have to do this now," she said softly. "I'm sorry, but... we just don't have time."

"We'll take the time," he insisted. "Kate. We can't just waltz in there. We figure out a plan and we follow the plan."

"Because the plan works so well for us," she muttered.

Castle actually laughed, and she felt his hand come to her thigh and squeeze. She opened her eyes to him and he was grinning in the faint darkness.

"You're right. And we will, Kate. How about this? When this security team gets below us, I'll take them out and we'll go in."

"Take them... out."

He held her eyes with his own, his smile growing fainter. "You know what has to happen. To keep us both _safe_. Mission like this, Beckett... can't have people coming up behind us."

"Can we shoot them in the kneecaps or something?"

He gave her a hard look, but she didn't give in. She was a _cop_, first and foremost, and the whole protecting and serving line couldn't be scrubbed out of her. Even in the Congo.

"All right," he said. "Kneecaps. Do my best, love."

* * *

"Stay," he warned her. She opened her mouth like she was going to argue the point and Castle gripped her thigh harder, leaning in against her, pressing her back to the trunk of the tree. "No. You stay up here. You don't move."

"What if you-"

"Beckett," he growled. "If you can't follow orders, I will abort this mission."

She swallowed and looked away from him, but this wasn't up for debate. "It's my - my conscience," she said finally. "I'm the one who can't kill them. What if you get hurt trying to be nice and I'm just sitting up in a tree?"

"Sweetheart," he murmured, a little miffed. "What if I get _hurt_?"

"Trying not to..."

When she trailed off, he raised an eyebrow at her and eased up on the threatening posture, recognizing his former bullying tactics. He sank back onto his side of the limb, gave her a softer look. "I won't get hurt. Four guys? Not a problem from this height. I'll go down to the lowest limb and pick them off."

Her hands were on her thighs, palms facing up, the blood staining the dark of his t-shirt bandage. Her fingers curled in and she gave him a determined look, nodding. "Right. Okay. I'll stay up here."

"Only because you can't shoot worth a damn right now," he gave. "Not because I'm being a bastard."

She laughed, a short soft sound in the ever-lightening darkness. "No. Never."

"Are you patronizing me?"

"Only slightly."

"You stay up here," he gruffed, eyes narrowed at her once more. "I'm going down."

She suddenly reached out, her fingers scratching at his arm as she clutched him. "Kiss me, first."

"What?"

"Sitting in a tree, right? K-i-s-s-"

"I know how to spell kiss," he laughed, tilting his head as he stared at her. "What's this about?"

Her mouth opened, closed. And then a slow, sad smile stretched across her lips and reached the corners of her eyes. Her hand on his arm stroked slowly, her fingertips light. "Never mind, love. It's a playground song. Just kiss me before you go."

He didn't mind that, didn't know what a playground song was. He leaned in and touched his mouth to hers, tasted her desperation and her love all in that one, simple brush of lips.

"Then comes baby," she whispered. "Now go."

* * *

Castle kept his breathing slow, regular, and waited for the security patrol to hit just the right spot.

They walked in a line an arm's length from each other, working the grid in neat lines but with casual inattention. They wore roughly uniform dark cargo pants, military boots, and plain green t-shirts but all in varying shades. Each man seemed to be at ease in the jungle, knowledgeable about its pitfalls and respectful of its perils even if they weren't particularly alert. Two of them carried machine guns, one had a machete, and Castle could count three hand guns among them.

The one slightly ahead of the other three was also the farthest from Castle and appeared to be giving direction. If he was the leader of the squad, he did so with minimal attitude but he was also the one taking this the most seriously.

Castle judged the distance again and pressed his finger to the trigger guard of the rifle, sighted that farthest man down the length of the barrel. Kneecaps, she'd asked. Trickier shot from above, but he could do it.

Problem was that the four men were spread in a line. Now that they were closer, Castle could hear them speaking French back and forth, some kind of long and complicated story-telling, a joke maybe, and he assumed they were Gabonese nationals.

That gave him heart. Trained mercenaries like they'd dealt with back in Tunisia would be a problem. Locally hired, he hoped, meant they'd go down faster - and stay down, unwilling to risk their lives for a dubious enterprise.

Kneecaps it was.

He fired at the leader and didn't pause long enough to watch him go down. The other three had startled at the gunshot, turning and altering their trajectories, bringing their weapons up defensively, and Castle fired at the next man.

A scream and the flurry of wings in the trees, the choked off cries of pain, but Castle had the third man sighted. He shot on his exhale, but he felt the thunk of return fire at the base of the tree. He heard it now too, the wild scatter of gunshots through the trees, and a flicker of alarm went through him at the thought of Kate just above his head.

The fourth went down with a string of expletives, a chunk ripped from his elbow. Castle hadn't missed; the guard's arm had moved at the last second.

The first man - the leader - was moving now, groaning and reaching for his weapon even as he was laid out on his back. He brought the heavy-duty machine gun up to his chest, hand trembling hard as shock and blood loss began to set in, and when a burst of gunfire chattered through the trees, Castle had to put him down.

For good.

Castle waited a moment, but the three remaining were either unconscious or groaning to the canopy. He dropped down beside the dead man and untangled the cramped fingers from the machine gun, slung it over his own shoulder. One of the three shouted something alarming and Castle turned with his rifle aimed, and the injured man went silent, staring, wide-eyed.

He took it to mean the security team hadn't seen any action, which was good for him and Kate.

"Beckett," he called up.

She was already climbing down, slowly, painstakingly, but she was coming.

"We need to search them, strip them, and head out." She nodded, still going slowly, and he watched her progress with one eye on the fallen men at his feet.

When she got to the lowest branch, she peered down at him from above, her hair falling around her in wet tangles, her face streaked with dirt.

She was a little bit gorgeous, for all that, and he didn't even know why.

"Can you come catch me?" she said.

"Of course." And Castle headed to the base of their tree and lifted his hands up to her, ready for her.

* * *

Beckett stood still while he re-wrapped her hands in the last of his black t-shirt. They were wearing borrowed clothes now - the uniforms of the downed guards - and the machine gun was heavy on her shoulder. She'd shredded her palms climbing the tree, but she hadn't made it any better tying tourniquets on the men.

She'd told the man who could still walk that if he went through the jungle and disappeared, Castle's back-up team would leave him alone; the fight wasn't with him. _"Si vous fuyez par la jungle, personne ne viendra vous chercher." _The man had carried off his cursing friend who had a bullet in his foot, dragging him through the jungle.

There was no back-up team, but those guards hadn't known that.

Castle and Beckett were now left with the dead man and one still sweating it out on the forest floor, unwilling or unable to leave. He watched them with a cautious eye, gripping the shattered remnants of his knee, and his breathing was too fast, afraid.

She had tried to explain that they wanted nothing to do with him, but it didn't seem to matter.

"You should be good for now," Castle said suddenly. Kate glanced to her hands and tried to flex her fingers but the bandages were tighter this time. Less movement but less pain too.

"Good idea," she said then, "soaking the material in water. It feels better."

"It might not later on," he winced. "The blood and water will dry and stick to your skin. But hopefully we can soak it again taking it off."

Meaning, he hoped they were out of here soon. She did too. "I'm ready."

"Think you can shoot?" he said, nodding at the gun cradled against her side.

She experimentally aimed for the tree, let her finger rock against the trigger. "Yeah. I can."

"Steady?"

She rolled her eyes, huffed at him as she slung the strap of the weapon over her shoulder. "Yeah, Castle. It's steady. I'm not malnourished - just hurts."

He nodded, but his look was serious. He touched his fingers to the outside of her arm, trailed down to cradle her hand in his. "Thank you for staying put."

She opened her mouth but nothing came out; she didn't know what to say in the face of his gratitude. How much he needed her to be smart so that he could do his job.

"I got your back," she said finally, choking on it.

He nodded and turned around, headed for the supply pack. He shrugged it onto his back, adjusted his weapon, and then he faced her, ready to go, primed. He was ruggedly handsome in the pre-dawn grey, his jaw fierce and his eyes scanning the jungle for danger. He looked like he could take down an entire squad of assassins, like he would do it without flinching, barely lifting a finger.

His promises - all those promises he'd made her to survive, to always make it out alive, to never leave her - those promises seemed possible looking at him now.

"Time to scale the wall," he said gruffly. Maybe he felt it too, how _anything_ was possible in this moment.

"More climbing?" she complained, letting her voice hold a bit of a tease. Trying to get back there for them, trying to find their usual balance. "I'm sick to death of climbing trees."

"Well, Beckett, can't exactly go walking in the front door, can we?" He was smirking back at her, in that faded and stained green t-shirt, the dead man's gun cradled at his hip. "Come on. Stop complaining. You're not that hurt."

She grinned back and came to his side. "Better let me lead, Agent Castle. You'll have us turned the wrong way in no time."

* * *

"Hey," she said suddenly. "Mitch is trying to reach us."

Castle halted his work and glanced back at her. Beckett was holding the phone out to him, wriggling it a little as if to make it more enticing. He sunk the machete into the base of the tree, disgusted with himself at how long it was taking to hack through it, and he took the phone from her.

Mitch was calling from an unsecured line. Castle answered cautiously. "This is Pilot."

"Pilot this is Tower. I have unconfirmed reports of a third party interest."

Castle's blood ran cold. Someone else was talking about their excursion? No one was supposed to know about Black in Tunisia, let alone that he and Beckett had piloted a Cessna to Gabon and landed illegally within their borders on a search mission that might involve casualties.

Had already.

"Is this chatter?" Castle asked, sinking back down against the tree. He gesture to Kate and she crouched down with him, both of them now hidden by the underbrush near the wall.

"It's chatter, but I'm also picking up back channel rumors."

Rumors meant there was talk of an actual operation or investigation into what he and Kate were doing here. "That's not good."

"Wanted you to know. Second thing. We've got movement on the... State-side thing."

The State-side thing? Oh. _Bracken._

"Really?" Castle asked. "Things in place for an arrest?"

"Almost. We're talking with Secret Service and the grand jury will hear testimony - probably as soon as May. I thought you'd want to know."

"Yeah, that's... wow. Thanks." How surreal it was to be thrown back into the middle of the case that mattered most. Or used to. And now this - a jungle in the Congo with his wife to steal some pills. "Keep me appraised on the rumors, Tower."

"Roger."

Castle ended the call and studied the phone for a moment before lifting his head. "Bracken is as good as done," he told her. His heart beat fast at the thought of finally closing this case for her. "Grand jury for an indictment probably by this summer."

Kate's eyes filled, but she didn't cry. Instead, her face tilted to the sky and her lashes touched her cheeks, her arms coming around her knees and holding herself together.

Castle waited her out, let her have the moment, because he knew what it was for her. He'd seen her at her darkest, digging and clawing through that case file, and everything was finally starting to come together.

Bracken's days were numbered, and they'd done it _legally._ Within the system her mother had loved and fought to protect.


	8. Chapter 8

**Close Encounters 15**

* * *

Beckett shifted her weight forward and eased into Castle's arms. When her back foot left the tree branch, she was suspended in mid-air for a moment, Castle's grip the only thing keeping her from falling into the snare of barbed wire at the top of the wall.

She drew her knees up while Castle carefully navigated her over the barbed wire and onto the narrow ledge where he was crouched. She felt the arches of her feet cramp as she balanced there, but Castle held up a hand for her to wait.

She swayed, her heart pounding hard - there was nothing to grab hold of if she got off-balanced, just angry loops of razor wire before the long fall to the earth below.

Castle listened intently for another second and then he made the jump to the ground inside the compound, light on his feet and rolling to distribute his force. He came up behind an outbuilding that they'd determined must be storage, and his hand touched the metal before he turned back to her. She perched awkwardly on the top of the wall, and then Castle navigated to the space below her and held his arms out.

"Slowly," he mouthed.

She nodded shortly and eased one foot off the wall, bent her knee to squat down. With her boot scraping down the side of the wall, it was easier to keep her balance, but the whole thing was still tricky and her body was already pushed to the limit.

"I got you," he murmured softly. His hands reached up and caught the bottom of her foot, gave her the support so that she could lower herself down. With her ass on the top of the wall and razor wire a hair's breadth away from her spine, Beckett gripped the ledge and let herself descend.

Castle guided her feet to his shoulders, and she kept her weight on her hands for as long as she could before she had to let go.

Castle didn't even stagger. He supported her as she eased down the side of the wall, and then he grabbed her by the waistband of her pants and kept her upright. Kate gasped when her knee hit his cheek, but he didn't falter. His hands inched up to her ribs and gripped her, kept her steady, and then she slid down his body.

Her stomach fluttered. His eyes were focused, intent on the mission, but she couldn't help the moment of unprofessional _want_ that surged. She wrapped her arms around his neck, surprising him, and pressed her cheek to his, needing a moment.

Mitch's phone call had rattled her. Shaken her concentration and turned her inside out. Her mother's death seemed to be touching her in places she hadn't known could still be touched.

"I got you," Castle said softly at her ear. He pushed on her hips and nudged her away; Beckett stood alone, dropping her arms from his neck and taking a breath.

"We need to get inside," he told her. Castle was already turning, scanning the limits of the building before them while using the wall of the storage shed to remain undercover.

She struggled back from the edge of her frantic, useless _hope_, tried to ignore the weight of her mother's death and what it meant to have it finally over.

Over. It was over. They were so close to having _everything_; it was right here. She was afraid of too much good fortune, afraid that when something went right in one arena, it went so very badly in another.

The hope wouldn't die, though. She couldn't seem to kill it, despite how perfect a target they were right now. A hippo, the river, the monsoon, flash flooding, lightning strikes... had it not taught her that lesson yet?

"All right, looks like the west side has a basement entrance. Come on." He unslung the rifle from his shoulder and turned towards the compound, slipping between the wall and the out-building and gesturing her to follow.

On this side, the compound was showing signs of neglect: the jungle ran right up to the perimeter wall, the inside grounds were overgrown with tangled vines and flowering plants, and the compound itself looked pitted, as if it had taken more than a few potshots.

"It's been bombed," Castle said softly.

She followed him along the back wall, using the leafy vines as cover, ran her fingers over the scars in the concrete. "What happened?"

"I don't know, honestly." He shook his head and paused at a window, giving it a quick head check. "There was government opposition in the nineties, protests and a coup, but I don't remember the military getting out this far. This looks shelled."

"Shelled," she mused, the grit from the concrete wall crumbling under her fingers. "That would have to be a sustained assault, Castle."

He glanced over his shoulder at her and his eyes were shuttered; he was focused on the mission, not the past. "Could be right. Maybe Black was here then, maybe he took it by force. Hard to know - it's old, fifties I bet, so it's probably changed hands a few times."

Beckett stopped asking questions, choosing instead to follow behind him and think on her own. Castle had been on the regimen since he was five years old, which meant that his father had been doing this - playing a shell game with the pills and the injections - for at least thirty years. Probably longer.

How had it started, where had he gotten the funding? _Someone_ had to have instituted the program, approved Black's plan for the regimen. Who had _that_ been? Maybe a coterie of black-suited men, waiting in the wings for the program to come to fruition. "Castle. You said when you were in Afghanistan - how many of those guys were on the regimen then too?"

"They didn't last," Castle answered over his shoulder. They'd rounded the corner and were approaching the south side where Castle had discovered a possible basement entrance. "This was after 9/11, you know, so guys were lining up to be the ultimate soldier, track down terrorists. We had a sixteen man squad, but, love, it didn't go so well with them."

"You said they'd been killed. Some went AWOL."

"Psychotic. Dangerous. It pushed them over the edge. I've been on regimen my whole life - basically - and these guys were getting full doses of the stuff, one right after the other, just to match my levels. It was an experiment, but they signed up for it. We were getting shot to pieces in Afghanistan during the war; they all wanted the edge the regimen gave us."

"So your squad of Special Forces guys - they were super too. But it fried their brains and your father quit experimenting on live subjects. Is that it?"

"Mostly. Of course, at the time, I didn't see it like that. Every single one of those soldiers was taking something. Adrenaline pills, caffeine pills, prescription stuff, even protein boosters. Anything that might work, those guys would take."

"For the edge," she murmured.

"Exactly." Castle paused at the foot of a ground-level entrance into the compound's assumed basement. "It worked until it didn't."

Instead of going for the basement entrance, he turned around and gave her a long look. "Kate, if I didn't have you - a future I wanted - I'd be right inside this place with him. Because, yes, the regimen gives me the edge to be the machine, to shut down everything else and focus on the mission. But it narrows my _life_. Winnows it away, makes it nearly impossible to be or _breathe_ anything other than the mission. And I didn't want that. I don't want it now. I want you."

Beckett stood at the dark metal doors leading into what was hopefully a service tunnel into the compound. On the other side of those doors might be the thing that saved Castle's life - not just in the long run, some kind of maintenance program, but also maybe on a mission one day as well. The edge that got him out alive, that healed him faster, kept him from bleeding out in her arms, saved his life.

But to what life?

She remembered the man who had kidnapped her off the road four years ago, remembered the way that civil war had been raging inside him. The battle for supremacy between spy and civilian, and both chafing at the conflict.

An integration had happened these last few years; the whole man was standing before her now, telling her he wanted more for them than what he'd been.

"Kate, before you... not even worth it. But since you, love, I have every reason to walk inside this building and take what I need to keep my life, this life I can't be without. So are you going to help me?"

"Always."

* * *

It was radio silence from there on out. Castle felt his wife right at his heels, the warmth of her presence at his back as they navigated through the dark. The ground-level entrance was so far a long series of steps leading deeper into damp, muggy warmth but he didn't want to use much light.

The faint blue glow of the phone on its dimmest setting was all he wanted to spare to the darkness. Beckett held it at her thigh and cast the light along the next step and that was all, his body blocking a good portion of its luminescence in case they stumbled on a guard.

They didn't speak, only took the steps one after another, heading deeper, both of them ready. He had checked the automatic weapons before they went in, stopping just short of disassembling them to be certain they were reliable. Castle kept the borrowed weapon close, but his side arm was there too, a familiar presence.

The stairs ended abruptly, making Castle pause at the bottom. He reached back and lifted Beckett's arm, angled the light out a little. She took over, shining down the long tunnel as it flattened out to their right. The light was swallowed up by a grey darkness farther down, the floor uneven.

He shrugged and she nudged him forward.

So they followed it.

The walls were concrete now, no longer just mesh-reinforced dirt, but filled with cracks that weeped with moisture. He could smell cooler, fresher air the farther they went, and soon they no longer needed the phone's glow to see by.

Beckett put it away but Castle shook his head. "GPS," he murmured. He didn't want them accidentally running into his father.

She gave him a sad smile. "Not specific enough," she sighed. The phone stayed in her back pocket, her empty hands spread in supplication. "It says we're right on top of him. I guess it can't pinpoint that narrowly."

Castle scraped a hand down his face but he didn't comment, just kept moving forward. They were hustling now because soon the guards would be missed when they didn't come back from their perimeter sweep. They didn't have much time.

The tunnel became a hall and widened out into regularly-placed fluorescent lights banked in the ceiling. The tubes were crackling and flickering, throwing blue and yellow across the floor. Castle was getting a picture of the compound now - the ill-kept yard, the trees crowding into the wall, the mixture of types of rods in the light fixtures. Shoddy maintenance meant his father's hideout was mostly forgotten, neglected by what governments or agencies had once controlled it.

He was beginning to think they'd find nothing at all here.

But of course, the stabilizing pills had been locked in an armory room inside a forgotten CIA listening station - a post considered entry level and not worth much oversight. Which made it ideal for keeping a secret cache, Castle figured, so anything was possible here. Maybe the rotting outbuildings were a smokescreen.

The hallway ended at a junction. He paused and Kate stopped at his side, her shoulder brushing his. "Up to you," he said quietly.

She headed left, bringing them deeper into the building's guts as it began to curve slightly. He had a rough mental map of where they were, but he knew Beckett's was unerring. She took the lead now, their footsteps echoing back to them in the strange emptiness, and Castle couldn't help adjusting his grip on the machine gun, ill at ease in all the silence.

Beckett stopped abruptly and he danced aside to keep from running into her, gritting his teeth at his own distraction. She was yanking him back to the wall and he saw the closed door just past them, the little window in its steel frame, and inside - movement.

"Catch a glimpse?" he asked, breathing softly near her cheek as he pressed himself flat.

"Yeah. Five men."

"Shit."

The hallway ended here. No other doors. No options. "Should we try the other hall?"

"No," she said quietly. "If there are men past here, then this is where everything starts."

"Good point. You got a plan?"

She shook her head. He didn't either but they couldn't just hang out here in the underground tunnel, waiting for something to happen.

"Five men," he repeated, calculating their odds. "Let me take a look."

Her fingers came to the sleeve of his borrowed green shirt, plucking, but he ignored the concern in her eyes and eased towards the door. The metal was warm - almost hot to the touch - and Castle shifted slowly until he had eyes through the window.

It looked like a boiler room. Bright blue pipes ran overhead and grey, round boilers lined one wall. The five men were arguing over the last boiler, one of the panels opened up and steam jetting out. One of the men danced back, shaking his hand, and already Castle could see a welt rising to the surface of his skin where he'd gotten too close.

Maintenance and a couple guards, it looked like. The walls were concrete and plaster, a few lines of brick as if the builders of the place had been scrounging for materials. One of the ducts that rose from the boilers was split down one side and had been repaired with sheets of bright metal, but the screw holes were rusting and steam escaped every now and then.

Why boilers in the Congo? It was a question he didn't have an answer for, but he liked their odds in that room. The aging vents and the steam, the two guards inspecting a broken boiler, the mechanics in the way - they could have that place locked down in no time.

Castle shifted away from the door and gestured for Kate; she came to his side and lifted an eyebrow.

"How're your hands?" he asked. "Think you can machine gun over their heads?"

Her lips quirked, probably in acknowledgement of how melodramatic that was. But if he was going to let all these people _live_, they needed an element of drama to keep potential hostages in line.

"Yeah, I can. Machine guns are recoil-based, so it won't shove back. Means I can actually aim."

Like he didn't know that. "Exactly. You get eyes on the room?"

She nodded. "Five guys, mechanical room. About twenty yards long, rear door opposite this one. Something is broken, I'd guess."

He grinned down at her, that familiar surge of arousal and excitement spilling into his bloodstream. She was battered, they both were, but they were about to kick some ass.

"All right then. Here's the plan."

* * *

When Beckett softly opened the door, a wall of noise screamed out past them, echoing in the hall and covering every move they made.

Castle shot the first guard in the knee, second one in the thigh, and the three mechanics went down of their own volition, faces flat to the floor, hands stretched out, yelling _Je me rends!_ even as Beckett sprayed machine gun fire into the far wall.

No ricochet, since it was brick; Castle had pointed out that she had to be careful not to shoot the metal ductwork or pipes, why it mattered how good her aim was. She was stupidly _proud_ she'd peppered the brick wall as instructed, and she shot Castle a grin over the clamor of the boilers.

Castle looked amused. She didn't care. It was a win and she'd needed a win. It had been a long few months of loss after loss after near-loss, and a win felt good.

One of the guards was babbling his pain out into the room, great heaving gulps of air and pleading, but the groaning of water through pipes and the ferocious noise of the boilers drowned it out. Had probably masked the sounds of their gunfire as well.

They still held the element of surprise.

Castle nodded to the mechanics and Beckett handed him her machine gun, slung the rifle cross-body so that it wouldn't get in her way. She started forward and told the mechanics to put their hands on their head, yelling to be heard above the noise.

They all complied, and Beckett leaned over the first one cautiously, used the long strips from the remnants of Castle's shirt to hogtie the man's wrists and ankles. She was fast, but the cotton stretched and loosened, and she had to untangle the knots and do it again.

After that, she got the hang of it, trussed the other two without incident. Castle came to the guard unconscious on the floor, lowered his weapons to help her bind his leg. It'd been a good shot, but now she was worrying about long-term effects - how would this man survive with a shattered kneecap, what were the rehab chances this far into the Congo, could he get to Libreville for medical attention in time?

"Stop thinking," Castle said quietly. "Just triage him and go."

She swallowed it down, redirected that urge to protect-and-serve into binding the man's leg. The wound was vicious, the bone like gristle, but the femoral artery hadn't been nicked and bleeding was minimal. Castle came back to her with a rag he'd found and she used it to wrap around the relatively cleaner strip from Castle's shirt, binding it.

When she tightened it, the man groaned and his eyes rolled beneath his lids, but he didn't wake. The conscious guard stared back at them with a fever in his eyes, and Kate didn't like the look of the flesh wound.

"You missed his knee," she said.

"He turned at the last second," Castle said dispassionately. He was already kneeling before the man, grabbing for the leg. The guard shouted and promptly passed out, and Castle gave her a strange grin over his shoulder. "Did the work for us. It's not so bad. Probably hurts, but it's a deep graze."

"A graze," she repeated doubtfully. Blood had seeped into the man's pant leg, plastering it to the wound. But she handed Castle the last of his shirt and he made a compress, tying it quickly behind the calf.

"A graze," he said firmly. "Time to go."

She stood up with the machine gun ready again, and Castle led the way to the far door. The pipes over their head rushed and spit with steam, made it uncomfortably hot, her sweat running freely. He reached the door and eased it open, weapon aimed to the strip of darkness beyond.

"What do they need boilers for?" she asked.

Castle grimaced and head-checked through the door, gestured for her to follow. They escaped the stifling, moist heat and stepped into a relatively cool staircase, though the metal under her fingers was warm to the touch.

"I don't know. High pressure. Lots of energy. Doesn't make much sense."

"Unless they're making something here," she said slowly. She glanced back to the open door of the boiler room, heard its noise raging even as they climbed away from it. "Making munitions or-"

"Or regimen," he interrupted. His head was turned to her, his eyes two chips of ice in the murky light.

Regimen. Could they be that lucky? Had Black escaped to a manufacturing lab?

Oh, _God_, she hoped so.

* * *

They filed up two flights of stairs, opting to avoid the first floor and hopefully Black as well. Castle checked the hall just outside the stairwell and was confronted with more of the same - unending concrete and flickering fluorescent lights.

Beckett took point as they walked purposefully down the hall, the idea being that if someone saw them, in their uniform pants, boots, and green shirt, they'd look like they belonged. At least long enough for Castle to take the enemy out before he could raise the alarm.

Only two doors on this hall, and he stood guard as Beckett checked the first room. She made the sweep and came back out, shook her head in dismissal. "Holding cell."

Huh. Interesting. They moved to the next door, but he knew what they'd find. And as he had thought, she didn't even need to step all the way inside.

"Observation room?" he asked.

She nodded in confirmation and they quickly traversed the hall and turned right at the junction. This time they were met with rows and rows of doors, and the floor had scuff marks and shine to it that indicated regular use.

"Divide them up?" she asked. "We don't have much time."

"No, we'll go together." It'd been her idea not to separate, so he was going to stick to the plan. "We'll go fast. It may be that what we need is on the first floor anyway."

"Right," she sighed. Castle followed her to the first door on the right and they entered as a team, sweeping the room with their weapons drawn.

Kate gasped.

It was an ante-chamber to a clean room. The far wall stretched the length of the building itself and held rounded-off rectangular windows onto what had to be a chemical lab. The light was a strange red-yellow coming in through those observation windows, and beyond that the actual lab itself was silently, impressively _waiting._

"Wow," she said.

He stared at the operation before them, the neat rows of work stations, the machines, the fan filters set into the ceiling, the wires and elaborate equipment. There were strange empty spaces where it looked like other, larger mechanical beasts had stood, and he was reminded of a mission in China, a room like this.

"I've seen this before," he said slowly. "I stole a photomask in Shanghai once... this is what that lab looked like."

"A photomask?"

"It's the pattern used to make microcircuits. The light is yellow like this to keep the photomask stable and that clean room had a similar layout. You're right - something is being made here."

"You think microcircuits?" she said, shuffling closer. He watched her fingers come to rest against the window, a wistful lean to her body. "I guess that could be it. But-"

He watched her as her words fell off, came up at her side even though it left their backs exposed to the door. "What is it?"

"It's not microcircuits. It's regimen," she said quietly. Her finger crooked against the window and she pointed. "Look, Castle."

He followed her gaze and saw what she'd spotted: the telltale gleam of those silver cases. Four had been laid out, open and empty, waiting for the final product. Now that he was studying it more closely the room held other signs as well - the dispensary against the far wall, the kind of machine used in compressing pills into uniform tablets, and what looked like storage for inactive ingredients.

"You see that funnel-shaped machine? That's a granulation machine. I've seen those before," she said, her voice fast with excitement. "The pills are made like that. Up at the top is the hopper and agitator, and those two gear-shaped boxes on the sides press the compound together."

"Pills," he said quickly. "But that's what we have already, the stabilizers."

"That's what we already have," she echoed. Her eyes turned to him, her face reflecting the intense yellow light of the room and casting a sick glow in her eyes. "They manufacture stabilizers."

"Then it does us no good," he rasped. "All this for nothing."

"No," she croaked. "No. I'm not giving up. There has to be more. Something."


	9. Chapter 9

**Close Encounters 15**

* * *

"All this for one man," she said, standing in the middle of the clean room. She knew the regimen had been a big deal, had been a program that controlled her husband's whole life, but this was on a scale she almost couldn't fathom.

The compound - this installation out in the Congo - had taken them almost an hour to recon: building after building, barracks and storage spaces clustered around this one manufacturing plant. Now that they were inside, the vast reaches of the clean room with its efficiency and spare style made her blood buzz, adrenaline pumping through her.

They'd made it this far. And here she was, no suit, no mask, all her dirty particles agitating the fan filters in the ceiling over their heads. "Castle. Just how many of these pills you must have taken your whole life..."

Castle stood guard near the door, looking more tense than usual. She knew he wanted to leave and make quick work of searching the rest of the building, but she wanted to scour this lab first.

Never knew.

She started with the table containing the empty silver cases, opening drawers and pulling down bottles. If they had finished product here - like these cases - then maybe they had serum already stockpiled.

"It had to be refrigerated," Castle said from across the room.

She didn't see any refrigeration units. Kate spun slowly on her heel and scanned the long room, began pulling out drawers absent-mindedly.

All _this_ for one man?

No. No, this couldn't be right. The lab was fully functional, and the spaces where equipment had been removed looked like it had only been updated with newer models. It wasn't abandoned at all. Maybe those outbuildings had been neglected but work was going on here, this was for _more_ than just one man.

"What time is it?" she said suddenly, pausing as she ransacked the drawers. "Castle. Time?"

"Nearly five."

"When do you think their day starts?" she said quickly.

"Whose day?"

"Their work day," she added, gesturing to the lab. "This is active. This isn't a relic."

"Active? You think so?"

"I just found lipstick in this drawer. A woman's handwriting with an address and directions written down on a post-it note. No dust."

"Well, it's a clean room, Kate. No dust."

"Exactly," she pointed out. "Fan filters in the ceiling are still going. I guess the boiler room down there is powering those things 24/7. Which means people are going to start showing up to work-"

"Oh, shit. Soon."

"Soon enough," she admitted.

"Hurry."

She narrowed her eyes at him, but he was right. She kept searching the workstation, ignoring personal effects when she came across them, looking for more information. They couldn't have come all this way only to find stabilizers. Alone, the stabilizers were worthless. The serum in those injections caused all the magic, and if she had to have one without the other, she wanted the serum.

He _needed_ the serum.

"Kate."

"Let me look," she insisted. The next work station was more of the same, and it looked like there were at least ten people assigned to the clean room. She saw ten distinct personalities in the little items left behind, even though - quite possibly - none of these things were supposed to be in here.

Could be more employees than that.

And they'd be coming in to work at what time? Six? Seven? Was the woman with the lipstick an early riser who liked the quiet before everyone else got to the lab?

They didn't have much time.

She found inactive ingredients in storage jars, all neatly labeled in French: binder, bulking agent, glidant. Their chemical names were things she couldn't translate, but the details gave her enough context.

She moved on to what looked like a file cabinet, rubbed her thumb over the lock. "Castle."

"Faster, Kate."

"I need a lockpick. Something."

He grumbled, but he left his place by the door and came to her, fishing into his pack and pulling out the kit. "Here. Quickly."

She bent over and picked the lock of the file cabinet, pulled out a low drawer filled with labeled folders. She thumbed through the tabs, looking for something - she didn't know what - and she felt Castle come up at her back. _Charlie One, Patient Zero, BLK-AIT, MKU._

He reached past her, plucked an old-fashioned manilla folder from the tab labeled _Charlie One_. He opened it to read and she saw official-looking letters, copied on a mimeograph machine and the paper brittle with age. As Castle flipped through the file, the pages were the strong-smelling, purple-inked papers from ditto machines like she'd had in elementary school.

"What's that?" she said, not entirely interested. "Charlie One?"

"I don't know," he said slowly. "But that's my father's Army code at the top. This one is addressed to him."

She peered over his shoulder but the page he was looking at was so smudged, it was nearly illegible. "Dated December 1, 1974. Wasn't there some Cold War stuff going on in this region during that time?"

"Couple years off. That was from '60 to '65. The Congolese wanted independence from Belgium and the UN had to mediate because the Prime Minister threatened to go to the Soviet Union for help. This is December, 1974. Huh. I was five."

Five?

Beckett gave it a surface look, but she left Castle at the files, content to let him pore over history. A bunch of files wouldn't tell her where Black had hidden his regimen, unless it was a _map_.

"Hey," she said, glancing over her shoulder at him. "Is there a map of this place?"

Castle grunted, lifting an eyebrow at her, but then he nodded. "Yeah, maybe." He bent back over the file cabinet and began removing huge reams of paper - what looked like lab reports to Beckett from this distance. Not maps.

She kept going around the room, checking cabinets and drawers, opening glass doors and peering into canisters. She found another storage cabinet containing ingredients, and she ran her fingers quickly over them, expecting more of the same.

But she found an ingredient that didn't belong, wouldn't compound into tablet form. Benzodiazepine. She knew it only because it had been COD in a homicide she'd investigated, a psychoactive and anti-convulsant the man had been taking for his epilepsy. His wife had mixed heavy doses of his medication with alcohol and an anti-depressant in her bid for the life insurance money.

What Beckett had discovered in her research then was that benzo was safe in the short term but caused cognitive impairments and paradoxical effects over a long course of treatment. Didn't that match with what Saber had told her? That he'd expected Castle to go crazy with only the serum. Was it because benzo was in that serum?

"Castle," she said slowly. "What was the mood drug that King noticed in your file? The one he was supposed to keep tabs on?"

"I can't remember. Benz... something."

"Benzodiazepene," she said, her raw palms beginning to throb with the franticness of her pulse. "That's what this is. In this bottle. That's not in the stabilizers, Castle. That's in the serum. It's here. They make it here too. We have to find it."

* * *

"The other side of the hall?" he suggested.

Her face cleared, that anxious intensity morphing into determination. "Yeah. You get what you need? Any maps?"

"No maps," he said. His fingers felt numb though, and he'd stacked file after file on top of the cabinet. So many copies of official US Army documents, words he recognized, acronyms he knew - like AIT: Advanced Individual Training.

His father had mentioned it to one of the drill instructors he'd had in Afghanistan in 2002, back when he'd re-upped and thought he had escaped his father for a while only to have the man follow him. The unit he'd been assigned to had been up for AIT - and now these files addressed to his father from _1974_.

He'd been five.

"Castle. Maps? Anything?"

He lifted his head, felt like he was swimming through that monsoon again. "No. Nothing."

"Then _come on_. We don't have much time."

She was heading for the clean room door, so he gathered the files he'd found, stuffed them into his backpack. He followed after her, saw her jabbing at the controls to the airlock, frustrated with how long it took to seal the door behind them. He laid a hand on her shoulder and squeezed, trying to transmit some calm, but he could feel how it had taken hold of her.

The idea that they'd done all of this for nothing, that there'd only be stabilizers here and nothing else - it had nearly sunk her.

She was first out of the ante-room even as Castle tried to muscle past her to check the hall. She flew to the opposite side where an equal number of doors spaced the wall. He saw her face light up when she reached for the door knob, already anticipating.

"Beckett," he barked.

She stopped, turned back to him.

"As a _team_," he insisted, coming up at her side now with his weapon. "On me."

She shot him a seriously dirty look, but he wasn't compromising on this one. Castle opened the door and shouldered through, his weapon drawn, and found himself in the same exact space.

Ante-room with windows. Only this time, the light in the lab was blue. Clean, cool blue.

No file cabinets in here. But he saw the long rows of refrigeration units, and he knew.

Something in his chest eased, like a weight tipping off of him, and Beckett came up at his side to touch the window with reverence.

"This is it. Look at it. This is it, Castle."

The serum. Those huge refrigerated units took up the entire back wall, and a sterile environment seemed to be set up around the work stations. White, rounded boxes stood on one table, their cords running into the cable holes at the back and disappearing.

"Centrifuges," she said. "For fluids. Angle rotors - I've seen Lanie use them."

"Fluids."

"Like blood analysis," she clarified. "But here for that serum-"

"It's liquid," he finished. "Got it."

"They make the stabilizers on one side of the hall and the serum on the other."

"I can't believe my father would have it done all in the same place," he said. "All his eggs in one basket?"

"Doesn't... sound like him," Beckett said cautiously. "Actually, you're right. Doesn't sound like him at all."

He nodded, but Beckett was already moving for the entrance to the lab, shoving hard on the sealed door and entering the airlock. Castle came with her, disliking the sensation of the closed space, the sense of being trapped, but he didn't know what else to do.

Those files next door were haunting him. Something about them made his guts churn.

"We can test it at home," she said quietly. Her chin was stubborn, her jaw hard in the blue light. Her hair had a strange wash of green to it. "We'll give it to Boyd and Threkeld and they'll make sure it's the right thing, that it won't hurt you."

He didn't like being caught in this lab, the rows of labeled jars and the mixing agents, the pipettes and the centrifuges lined up and ready. He felt exposed with those wide windows all along the wall.

1974. He'd been five years old.

"See?" she breathed. "Here it is. Castle."

She was already at the freezer units, and now he could hear them too - the sounds of the boiler room below, laboring to keep everything at a stable, consistent temperature.

Beckett tugged on the handle and crystal, cold air came washing over them. When the frost cleared, there it was, illuminated white and blue in the light from the freezer.

"Oh, thank you, God," she whispered, reaching inside and touching one of the vials.

She yelped and jerked her hand back, pressed her fingers to her chest with a wounded look in her eyes.

"Kate?"

"Burned," she said. "It surprised me. I'm fine."

"Burned?" He opened the other door and found larger containers of the serum, these stacked to be portable and fitted inside carrying cases. This side of the freezer had a temperature gauge and he whistled when he read it.

"That's 18 below," he said. "Flesh freezes when exposed in fifteen minutes or less. So - no - don't go touching the metal containers, Beckett."

"How do we get it out of there? Why is there so damn _much_?"

Good questions, but he could only answer one of them. "Look for gloves - I'm sure they have to handle it carefully. And see these cases? Like a bigger version of those silver ones that the regimen always came in - insulated so it will maintain its temperature."

"We can carry them out in those." She was already moving away from him and he shut the doors once more, looking for gloves or something they could use to carry the cases until the handles warmed up.

"We'd have to be fast, get them into cold storage ASAP. Or else..."

"I bet that's why they're frozen," she said from across the room. She was rifling through drawers, dragging out what looked like a roll of sanitation paper. "If they're 18 below, then they can survive long shipping trips."

"Could be. I don't think that paper will work. Too thin. We need something with padding."

"Yeah," she said, replacing it carefully. He was banging drawers and rattling things. She closed her fingers around his wrist. "Hey, love, be gentle. If we leave it as un-assed as possible, then maybe they won't know we've been here."

"We're stealing stuff," he said in response.

"But I mean, they'd keep making it here, wouldn't they? Since we can't take everything with us - maybe they'll keep making regimen, and we can come back."

No. No, they wouldn't be coming back.

* * *

Beckett shrugged her shoulders with the ache in them, but she had two cases of the larger serum wrapped in batting wool and shoved inside the backpack, along with some files Castle wouldn't let her leave behind. He had all the weapons and she had the precious cargo.

"You stay behind me," he said as they entered the anteroom.

She wished she had more, could carry more, but Castle had been adamant that both of them have their hands free. She knew it was dangerous for her to be completely defenseless, but it was a _lifetime's_ worth of serum and it was killing her to leave behind so much of it.

She had an idea, somewhere in the back of her mind, that the two clean rooms and their stores of regimen were part of something much larger than she could possibly understand, that there was an agenda at work here.

_All his eggs in one basket_? No. That was definitely not Agent John Black's usual m.o. and if he was manufacturing regimen in the Congo at an installation that looked like it had been here for over fifty years, then there was something else going on here.

"Castle," she to his back, watching the fluid line of his shoulders as he hustled them down the hallway. "Castle, we need to check out the first floor."

He came to a dead stop. She clenched her fists and took a breath, waited for him to absorb that.

And then she explained. "Castle, something's not right about this place. And you know it."

His shoulders dropped.

"Rick," she urged him. "We can't - I feel responsible for this."

Castle turned in the hallway, his face grim and set. "You're not responsible for him. Whatever this is - it's been happening for decades. You're not responsible."

And yet... there was a connection to Black she couldn't deny. He was Castle's father; he'd _made_ this man in front of her, half Black's DNA and the other half - while it might have been Martha's - now it was altered by the regimen Black had created. And then Kate had remade him, her husband the spy, and she and Black were the only two who would do anything to save him.

There was a connection there; she couldn't deny it.

"Castle," she said slowly. "I'm not responsible for what he's done here, no. But _what is it_ he's doing here? Do you have any idea?"

"How would I know?"

"No, I'm not saying you would, but doesn't it strike you as wrong? All of this set-up, the vast quantities coming out of those labs, the packaging and the - look, here, you saw the instructions printed on the sides." Beckett eased the pack off her shoulders and unzipped it again, pulling the case out by the batting wool. "See here? _Shake well before use._"

"What about it?"

"Why in the world is this necessary?"

"For the guy on the other end who administers it," Castle said with a shrug, his eyebrows knitting together. "Kate, we're not going down there. Black is down there somewhere. We're keeping well away from him."

"Castle, why is it necessary for Black to have instructions to be printed on the sides of the cases? Wasn't that usually _his _job? Didn't he give you the shots?"

Castle growled and raked a hand down his face, but she wouldn't be swayed. They were responsible for the regimen in many ways, responsible for what it was doing to him, to their family, but they were also responsible for what Black did with it too.

"Because we know," she said. "We know about it and no one else does. Those guys who served with you in Afghanistan, they had no idea what they were signing up for. And it drove them crazy. Saber said it was more than just AWOL, Castle. They became psychotic."

His hand dropped and his eyes regarded hers bleakly. "Coonan."

"What?"

"Coonan was in one of those squads," he told her.

Coonan. "You said you thought he'd been trained in your squ... oh, God."

"I'm sorry," he whispered, looking away.

Trained in his squad meant Castle had _been there. _Castle had been training right alongside those men. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I did. I - sort of. I didn't realize, Kate. I wasn't thinking about it like that. I told you he and I were given the same training in Afghanistan, that we learned the same skills, followed the same _program._"

"Program. And program was supposed to mean _regimen_?"

"Yeah," he scraped out. "I didn't know then what I know about it now. I don't know when he flunked out of the program, but he was doing black ops work in '99. For - for Bracken, I guess. He must have known about the squads because he was on the Oversight Committee. My father knew someone had gotten their hands on one of his - his projects."

She stared at him. "And so - so he agreed to go after Bracken with us. He gave us the resources of the CIA to go after Bracken to _cover his tracks._"

Castle rubbed his hand down his face, but she could barely register any of it. Castle gripped the gun tighter and his shoulders squirmed. "Cover his tracks or get back his custom-made killers. Really, Kate, I thought they were all killed in the last mission we went on - back in 2002. Supposedly killed. I survived but I thought the rest of them hadn't. Until Coonan."

Her heart struggled to catch up, her pulse beating too hard in her ears. "I can't... Coonan killed my mother, Castle."

"If anyone is responsible for this fucked up regimen, it's me. It's not you. I don't want you down there with him. I'll take you out, boost you over the perimeter wall, and then I'll come back on my own."

"No!" The panic crawled up her throat. She shoved the case back into the pack and slung it over her shoulders, securing it before she reached out for him. "Castle. We're not splitting up; we're not."

He looked wrecked, and she didn't know how to comfort him. All she could do was step into his body, slide her curled up, mangled hands to his waist. She let her cheek brush his and she breathed him in, the oil and sweat of him, the despair leaking out of his pores.

"Castle, don't leave me."

"No," he croaked. One of his hands reached up and clutched the back of her neck. He was breathing fast. "No. I won't leave you."

"If there was any other way..." she whispered.

"No. I know," he rasped. His fingers were heavy on her neck. "I know. We can't let him keep doing this. Sins of the father."

She pressed her forehead to the hard ridge of his cheek and reached up to cup the side of his face. "You're a good man," she whispered. "And that's why you know we have to do this."

* * *

They'd only made it as far as the stairwell when the phone vibrated against his thigh. He startled to a halt, that sickening sense of _this is how it ends_ welling up in his guts.

"What?" she whispered behind him. The stairwell was cramped on this end of the building and the air was muggy; sweat rolled between his shoulder blades and along his spine.

"The phone," he said. He safetied his side arm and holstered it, slid his fingers into the pocket of his pants. The satellite phone seemed heavy when he answered.

"Pilot this is Tower," Mitchell said. There was a strain to his voice. "We have unidentified third party in your area. Please be advised."

"Roger that," he scraped out. "No ID?"

"They're dark," Mitch answered. "Very dark."

Shit, that did _not_ sound good. He was standing in a stairwell with his wife inside of a building that looked like it had seen more than its fair share of sieges and was ready to call it quits.

Mitch went on. "But, man? I gotta say - from what I can decipher of the activity in your area, they're not friendly."

"Of course not, but-"

"To either side. You get me? I've got heavy artillery movements and dark ops troop deployments. Not to mention an advance scouting party. Heat signatures all over the map. And then Black - he's scrambling around down there."

"The tracker tell you that?" Because Beckett had said it wouldn't give that much fine-tuning.

"Are you listening to me? Heat signatures. Plus our contact in the village said work was cancelled; everyone was 'warned' to stay home. Fucking _notes _were dropped on them from a chopper. Did you know that place is manufacturing something?"

"Yeah, forget that for a second," he muttered. "Your contact say what time they usually begin their work day?"

"Oh-six-hundred."

Not good. They had ten minutes. "Consider me warned," he told Mitch.

"Good hunting," the man answered and then the connection was severed.

Castle took a breath and pushed the phone back into his pocket, turned his head to look at his wife, the anxious set to her eyes and the bruises that had blossomed over her neck and shoulders. She shouldn't be here, not right now, not like this, but then again - neither should he. This shouldn't be their problem, their responsibility, but this was their life - saving the world, one mission at a time, right?

"Kate," he started. Helplessness battled at him but he shoved it down ruthlessly. He was finished with that. What had been done was already done - nothing to do for it but move forward, be better, be grateful for what he had standing in front of him.

If they never reached their dreams, it didn't matter. Because _having_ the dreams - that was what was most important. She was someone he could dream with, and he'd never had that before. Never had the heart for it; she'd given him that.

So the battle to come? They could do it; they'd survive. They'd already survived. This was it.

"What?" she said. "Castle, you're scaring me. What's going on?"

He drew his weapon once more. "There's a black-ops team on its way here, right now, and they have heavy support coming in behind them. This same group has told the workers not to come in this morning - so Black probably knows the team is coming too."

"They're clearing out?" she asked, her voice tightening. "They're - the black ops team - it's not ours. It's not _theirs_ either."

"It's not theirs," he confirmed. "They wouldn't be ducking for cover if it were."

"Who is it?"

Castle glanced back to the door leading to the second floor labs, remembered the reams of files describing in detail the work being done, the connections, the _names_. "I think... it's whoever _established_ the program. They're cleaning up."


	10. Chapter 10

**Close Encounters 15**

* * *

The explosions started before they even hit the first floor. The stairwell jumbled and shook her hard, and Kate found herself tumbling down the stairs into Castle's back. He braced her and they pressed against the wall, suffering through two more shellings in quick succession, the noise roaring in her ears.

When the world stopped shaking, they took a second to stare at each other and then - as one - turned and jogged down the last steps to the door. The window set into the metal was shattered from the explosion and beyond Castle's shoulder, she could see that a portion of the exterior wall had collapsed inward.

Stairwell was probably the safest place they could have been. Castle reached for the door and Beckett came out behind him, crowding to see, and before her the long hallway was a mess of debris and exposed wire, a dust cloud swirling around it.

She could see sunrise just past the gaping portion of the wall, and Castle gripped her upper arm, keeping her with him.

"We need to get out of here," he said. "Screw responsibility. We're going." He looked like he was spoiling for a fight.

"Agreed." This was out of their depth - limited supplies and no protection - and now that they had cases of the serum in her hands, she didn't want anything to happen to them. "Let's get out of here."

Beckett started forward, heading for the hole in the wall, but Castle yanked her back. "No. Not that way. They'll breach the compound through the gap they've made. We go out how we came in."

Her breath caught but she only nodded, followed him around the debris in the hallway. They had to climb at one point, choosing careful footholds as the chunks of concrete shifted beneath their weight. Castle got to the top of a pile of rubble and reached down for her; she lifted her hand for him and the whole mound shifted, dragging her down with it. She fell hard on her side and felt the backpack thump against her spine, her ribs scraped by the jagged remnants of the wall as the landslide picked up force and dumped her at the bottom.

A piece of concrete was pinning her.

"Beckett!"

"I'm - okay," she called back. She felt her knee pulsing, her hip on that same side, and she tried to rise carefully to her hands and knees. The concrete shifted and lurched to one side, trapping her now by the backpack. "The bag is stuck."

"I'm coming down for you," he said. "Stay right there."

"I'm okay," she repeated, sliding one arm slowly - ow, more slowly - out of the strap. She winced as she pulled free and then she twisted around to stand.

Only to be met with a gun.

The barrel of a Soviet-era MCM pistol that - though old - would no doubt do the job.

"Stay right there," Black said quietly.

* * *

"No!"

Another explosion rocked the compound and Castle used the distraction to launch himself at his father. He tackled the man to the rubble, felt the wind punch out of him, an elbow to his cheek that made him see stars. A scramble through the debris and then Castle was on his feet, drawing his gun, but so was Black.

And he was pointing it at Beckett.

Castle kept his aim steady and breathed hard through the whistling in his lungs. "Beckett. Behind me."

"Can't."

He risked a quick look over at her and saw she was crouched in the shifted debris, hunched protectively over - the regimen. Stuck in the rubble.

Fuck.

"Seems we're at a stalemate, Richard."

"Back off," he growled, slowly easing his way towards Beckett.

"Not another step," his father snarled, starting forward, weapon aimed at Kate.

Castle, despite himself, felt his five-year-old's heart seize, stop its beating. He was a boy standing in the snow again, reciting the verb forms of _to carry_ in Chinese until he could get it right. _Not another step, Richard._

"Kate," he rasped.

"I've almost got it," she whispered.

"Kate, please."

"Don't move - either of you," his father said, sounding a little more in control this time. It didn't reassure Castle, not one bit.

"We're leaving," Castle said. "We got what we came for and we're leaving. Kate."

She grunted something and he shot another quick look her direction, saw she was trying to shove her shoulder against a stone that had pinned the material of the pack. "Almost, Castle. I swear. Please. I almost have it."

"You tell her to stop or I will shoot."

Castle slid the last inch over; he was now within saving distance should his father actually shoot at her. "You shoot her and your body is the next to fall."

"Do you know how _little_ that means to me? It would be _worth it_ to rid you of her."

"I will fucking _hurt you_," Castle roared. "Don't you dare make a move. I will hold you here and give you to those assholes who blew open their own front door. Is that what you want?"

He saw his father's attention shift for just a moment, a brief second, and that was all Castle needed to step fully in front of Beckett, shielding her completely.

"You _idiot_," his father growled.

"I got it," Beckett gasped. "Castle, I got. I have it."

"Stand up," he barked over his shoulder, his eyes still on his father. "We're going. We're going, Black. You hear me? You don't get to do this. We're leaving you here."

"Don't think I won't shoot you, son. I will. It's for your own damn good."

"I will fucking shoot you first. Don't think I won't. I _ache_ to kill you. Be rid of you for good."

"Rick," she hissed.

He half-turned to her, being careful to keep himself in front of her, but she came up at his side and tried to maneuver around him. Castle reached out his free hand and wrapped his arm around her waist, hauled her behind him, struggling to keep his aim steady on his father as she struggled.

"Beckett, _what did I say_?"

"You can't. You can't shoot him. You promised me."

He paused; he'd made that promise on top of a hundred other promises that he fully intended to keep, to always keep, and if his word meant anything at all to her-

He had to keep this one too.

"They're coming for you," Castle bit out sharply. "You might want to get out of here."

"Coming for me. How did they _find_ me? How did _you_ find me? That's the real question here, Richard. You have some damn big leaks in your department if they're here."

"Who are they?" Beckett spoke up. Castle could kill her with his own bare hands, holy fucking _hell_, woman, would she not just shut up and stay _safe_?

"You planted a bug on me," Black said, blinking now as if he was surprised. "You must have. Where? What is it? You're not safe if I'm not safe. You hear that, Kate? He's not safe if I'm not safe."

"What are you talking about?" she blurted out.

"Shut up," Castle growled. "You, both of you, shut up. We're not having a conversation. There are no deals. We're leaving."

"No, tell us. Tell me, John. What do you mean?"

"If they find me, it's only a matter of time before they break me."

"I hope they fucking _shatter_ you."

"Castle," she barked. "Shut up. John, who? Why are they after you - what does it have to do with Castle?"

It was all spiraling out of his control, so fast he couldn't hold on. "No. No - Kate. We're leaving him here. He's fucking alive, like I promised, and we are too and we are getting out of here. We're going home-"

"They're looking for him," his father said, talking louder to make himself heard. "Everyone else flunks out. They go fucking insane, Kate, but you already know that, don't you? Saber told you, as if he could somehow _hurt_ me with the truth."

"Saber?" she gasped. "The truth. What truth? What about the others?"

"It's not the _others _they want. This whole facility is designed to replicate and mass produce the only success I've ever had with the program. The only success - and they want it. They want Richard. And they will destroy everything to get to him."

* * *

_They want him._

"No."

"Kate, we're leaving." Castle gripped her by the arm, his weapon still trained on his father, and he began to haul her into his chest.

"No, no, wait. Wait. It's you - they're here for you," she croaked. But Castle was blocking her view of Black now, his whole body coming between her and the rest of the world. "Castle, baby, please. We have to - if they found him here. With the tracker - our tracker - it's our fault."

"I don't care."

"You should care," Black called out. "You should care because everyone you touch is involved in this. You think they have any regard for your wife? Your family? They will fucking murder her like I've always wanted, so maybe I should just tell them everything they want to know-"

Castle went very, very still. Kate lifted her eyes to him and saw the grim, deadly intent and she grabbed him by the back of his neck, yanked his head down to hers. "No. No, Castle. Not just for him, not just for the regimen, but for you. You don't do this. You are _better_ than this."

"Maybe I'm not. I'm destined to destroy him. Him or me, Kate."

"No," she insisted. "You're not murdering your father."

"We have what we need," he said. "We have it. You won't have to worry about my health any more. Just let me-"

"No. You can't. You can't. I'm not married to a murderer."

"You have an extraction point?" Black said. "Because we need to get this show on the road."

Castle growled and turned to face his father. "You are not coming with us."

"I have no wish to fall back into CIA custody. But _however_ they found me - they will find me again."

"The GPS tracker," Kate said loudly, knowing she was giving it away. "That's how they found you."

"Tracker," Black said, the word cold on his lips. He looked straight through her, his disdain for her now a terrible and chilling thing, as if he no longer cared what the consequences would be, he would kill her.

He would end her.

"If I'm tagged, I need to know how. I need to destroy the tracker, Richard, because when they find me - they will get everything. All of it. You."

"I don't care. Let it burn. Let them make another squad of Delta Forces to go batshit insane. It's not my responsibility."

"You think I can protect you once they get their hands on this?" Black yelled. "They'll know. They'll _have you_."

"Protect him from who?" Kate shouted.

"How do you think we got this program _funded_?" Black snarled. "You little bitch. You think you know everything, but you have no idea what you've done."

"You shut the hell up," Castle growled back. "She didn't do this. I'm the one who wants nothing to do with you. I'm not your machine; I won't be soulless. I want more and I want _her_-"

"Well, you won't have her - you won't have anything if they get their hands on the program," Black interrupted. His voice was like ice, in control again. "They'll slaughter everyone around you and take you to some underground lab. So you either _destroy this tracker_ or you destroy your whole life."

Beckett stiffened. "It's in your arm. He injected it - under the Army tattoo on your forearm."

Black gave it a brief flicker and narrowed his eyes. "Richard. When they _get me_, they get you too. Every man can be broken. It might take longer than most, but they will find a way to crack my head open. And then they'll know it's you - my own son - they'll know you're the _only one_ to survive."

The only one to survive? Oh, God. "Castle," she rasped.

"Kate," Black said quickly. "Get a knife. We're digging it out. Right here, right now. You're digging it out of me."

"Okay-"

"No," Castle said. "No. We are leaving. You get rid of your own tracker."

"If you don't do this - I'll only follow you. I'll bring them with me, right to your doorstep. I'll bring them right to Kate."

"You bastard."

Kate gripped his shirt and stepped closer, but halfway towards Black. "I'll do it. I'll dig it out of his arm - it's not that far under," Beckett said quickly. "And then they can't get to you, Rick. They won't know it's you." She turned sharply to Black. "Right? They don't know who it is you've been experimenting on, and that's what they've come for. Because you haven't made good on your promises."

"The program is sound; they're unwilling to train their children. Unwilling to put in the work."

"But not you," Kate said. "You had _him_. And he's perfect."

"He's perfect," Black echoed. Something went over his face that made her flesh crawl, the animal and un-humanness of it. "He's the completion of all my work."

She clenched her fists. "I'll dig it out. Castle, the knife. I need the knife."

"No," he said. And for just a second, he closed his eyes - like he couldn't believe what they were doing. "Not you. I'll do it."

"You?" Black said, sounding struck. "No. Her."

"Me," Castle growled. "Or no one. Give me your arm. We don't have much time."

* * *

Castle pulled out the machete.

"No!" Beckett gasped.

She must have seen his face because her horror flipped to a shocked, shaky laughter. At least there was that. They were at odds, but they hadn't been divided - they weren't conquered.

"Was that a _joke_?" his father hissed. "I didn't raise you to screw around, Richard. Complete the mission."

But he held Beckett's gaze with his own, let something of the grim smile play across his face - forced it to hold there. They were going to be fine; it would be fine. They would survive this as well.

Castle gripped the strap on Beckett's shoulder, tugged once on the backpack to get her attention. "I'll dig it out and then we go."

"Don't kill him."

"I made you a promise, didn't I?"

She didn't respond, only nodded, and he used the moment of distraction to swing his fist around and clobber his father. He grabbed the gun-hand and twisted Black's arm, the weapon clattering away. His father stumbled back, but Castle kicked the weapon into the debris. With his fingers wrapped around his father's arm, he yanked Black upright.

And then he reached into his pocket for his combat knife - the aluminum Spyderco Embassy Automatic - brought to his father's arm and he thumbed the release. The blade sang as it opened, perilously close to Black's vulnerable veins, and Castle couldn't help feeling pleased that he'd not only disarmed his father, but thoroughly unmanned him.

"Might want to bite down on something. This is going to hurt."

His father ignored him.

Castle couldn't help noting the irony of the old motto _live by the sword_. Beckett and the knife to her neck was now his father and the precision-crafted switchblade to a wrist made for slitting.

He pressed the point of the blade into the Army tattoo - the blur of ink so faded it was impossible to recognize. His father didn't even move and Castle felt that old stubborn determination rise up in him again - to make his father flinch.

He hadn't managed to accomplish that feat as a boy, but at least this time the pain would be real. And intense.

He was going to enjoy this.

Castle cut into the skin with the point of the knife - quickly, though; they didn't have the time to make it last. He used the three-inch blade to dig into his father's arm, the muscle rippling and twitching as pain receptors went active.

"Castle."

He ignored Kate's quiet warning and he curled his wrist to scoop at the flesh, felt the hard edge of the tracker meet the metal of the knife. He sliced upward - slowly this time - making sure it didn't slip off the edge of the knife and back into the man's arm.

"Rich-Richard," his father grunted.

He smiled and cut the tracker out, gripped it with his thumb and the edge of the knife to hold it up. "There."

"Then let's get out of here."

Beckett stood at his side, shoulder to shoulder, and their eyes met for a moment in understanding. He turned back to Black and shook his head. "No. You're not coming with us." He turned and unzipped the outside pocket of the pack still on Beckett's shoulders, yanked free the satellite phone.

He tossed it to Black, who was bleeding copiously from the open wound and holding his arm above his head. Black caught the phone with his other hand but gave Castle a raised eyebrow of indignation.

"Take that. Origin point is marked. We flew in a Cessna. You can pilot it out."

"No."

"I'd take it," Kate said quickly. "You know he enjoyed digging into your arm, making you bleed. That's the best I can do to control him. I know we need you. But he doesn't care."

Black stared at them.

"Explosions have stopped," Castle said quietly. "They'll be making entry in seconds. I suggest you run."

"And you?" Black sneered.

"We have our own plan."

Castle raised his gun and took aim at his father. "Go."

Black's eyes turned expressionless. Castle had seen that look a thousand times; he knew it was the end, a void, the way his father had of going absolutely cold. Nothing would penetrate that blackness, that vacuum.

His father was the ultimate black hole.

"If you're going to persist in turning me aside," Black said carefully, in control. "Then there's something you should know."

"What?" Kate breathed. "Tell us."

Castle could not care less. He kept his gun steady on the man in front of him. Black's gaze remained burned to his for one second longer, and then he turned his eyes to Kate.

He smiled. "Deal's off, Kate Beckett."

Castle's finger twitched on the trigger but Black was already gone, disappearing around the corner and behind a half-bombed wall, out of his sight.

And then he heard the thunder of boots on the ground.

"Kate," he rasped, turning to shove her forward. "Time to go. Go, go, go!"

* * *

Gunfire chattered behind them and she had no way of knowing, no earthly idea if Black had escaped.

They needed him; Castle needed him. Black had all the answers.

At first, she'd had to struggle against the urge to turn around and go looking for the man. She'd wanted to dart back into the rubble and see him with her own eyes, asking him to explain about the _program_, about what might have been done, about why the others all went crazy but not Castle.

There were so many things that might go wrong.

But when the bullets started in earnest, when the team coming in behind them seemed to spot them and shots called out, when she felt Castle's grunt at her back and knew he'd been hit and it became clear to her that they might not escape this-

All she wanted was to survive.

Finally, for once, her instinct to live kicked in hard. She was the one sprinting ahead of him, the backpack slamming her spine with every hard jolt of her feet. She raced towards the back wall where they'd accessed the compound, coming around the corner at a fast clip.

She stuttered to a halt at the damage, felt Castle plow into her from behind, cursing at her to keep _going._

"It's gone," she said dumbly.

"_Good_," he hissed, dragging her forward. "Easier on us."

The wall was gone. It'd been obliterated. All that remained were burning trees and the dust-motes on fire and the jagged chunks of concrete. If they'd been an hour later, if they'd taken their time after the river, if there'd never been the river's fast current, then they would have been on that wall.

Or they'd have missed Black entirely. No regimen.

A matter of minutes.

"Beckett, _move_."

She scrambled up over the rise of rubble, her hip and knee locking with pain as the debris shifted. Castle caught her around the waist and swung her over a gap; she gasped when a rod of rebar caught her leg and tore at her pants. Blood oozed thickly and Castle groaned.

"Shit, I'm sorry. I'm sorry-"

"It's okay," she put him off, getting to her feet on the sloped rubble. A burning tree nearby made the air ripple and warp with heat; it was hard to breathe, hard to talk. Smoke clung to the rubble and the dust choked her. "I'm okay."

"Let me see."

"Did you get shot?" she asked instead.

"Not really."

"Castle."

"It's a graze. Matches your cheek," he said pointedly. She gave up asking after him because it was only fair, and he was still conscious and on his feet, and even though he was super, a bullet wound could possibly bring him down if it was bad enough.

And he wasn't down yet.

"Let me see your leg," he said.

"Can we get off this hill first?" she muttered. "They're shooting and I want to be as low a profile as we can."

He laughed, his hand coming out to grip her elbow. "Look at you, sweetheart. Actually trying not to die for once."

"Don't be a bastard," she muttered. But he was grinning at her, his teeth white in the haze of smoke. "Stop smiling. It's like a beacon."

He closed his mouth but he was helping her down the side of the rubbled wall. Her calf wasn't bad, but it did burn with pain. Somehow the scrapes felt worse than a bullet wound, and the insult of her abraded skin clamored for attention.

And then it began to rain.

"Oh, damn it," Castle growled. "Not what we need."

"But them either," she pointed out. "The smoke is getting worse. Makes it difficult to take shots at us."

At the last, they had to climb down the face of the rubble's cliff, picking their way carefully. Castle called out good handholds for her or guided her feet into stable positions. She didn't know how he was doing it, going down first, and a few times when rocks tumbled down and he let out a noise under his breath, she knew he'd nearly fallen.

"I got you," he said suddenly, hands clamping around her hips. He lifted off her the side and set her down on the ground, beautiful, solid ground. "They're no longer chasing us. Your leg."

She sighed but turned her knee to bare her calf for him. The grime and dust made a paste that seemed to have stopped the blood; Castle gripped her ankle and poked at her, apparently not satisfied.

"It's got to be cleaned out soon," he said finally, standing up once more. His face was grim. "But we don't have the time right now. We need to get to the extraction point."

"And call who?" she said. "You gave Black our phone."

"The sat phone we used to track him, sure. But not the distress beacon."

"Distress beacon?" she gaped.

"You think after Russia I'm ever going to let us go _anywhere_ without one of those? It's that black little button hooked to the machete's harness."

"_What_?"

"You knew it was there."

"No. I did _not_." She could smack him; she really could. "You kept that from me."

Castle laughed and caught her hand even as she moved to grab the sheath at his thigh. Their fingers tangled and her breath caught, and even though it was pouring rain and she was choking on smoke and there was a highly-skilled mercenary team on their heels, she had a moment of blinding, shocking lust.

So she kissed him, smudged the smirk right off his face, wrapping her arm around his neck to yank him closer. He groaned and the rain drowned them both, but he was sucking on her tongue and winding his arms through the pack and around her, and she felt the heat of him scalding her skin, and then the steam hissed around them and curled through the smoke.

"Kate, I love you, but this is not a good time for this," he rasped at her mouth. But he kissed her again, and she felt the blood under her fingers now where the bullet had grazed him. He grunted when she gripped his shoulder a little harder, one of his knees sliding between hers, and it would be all very sexy if not for the sound of chopper blades coming through the rain.

"We gotta get out of here," she gasped.

"Extraction point," he said, grimacing and pulling away from her. "I hope you remember where it was. I could get us there, but it'd take longer."

"I remember," she said. "Move west to get out of their range, and then we'll come up on it from the south."

She headed off into the smoke and burning trees, felt Castle right at her back.

But closer than that was the heavy touch of the pack and all the regimen inside.

They had what they'd come here for.


	11. Chapter 11

**Close Encounters 15: Never Say Never Again**

* * *

He was sick to death of rain.

But Beckett was practically glowing. Her whole body vibrated with her joy, and while normally he couldn't resist touching that, the elite commandos on their trail put a damper on things.

Elite commandos. Honestly, he had no idea who had come looking for Black, piggy-backing off the CIA signal. The only way he could figure it - someone in his organization had leaked the information. Because whoever wanted his father couldn't have known that Castle tagged Black and was following him without some help.

He needed to do a clean sweep of his house.

And now he was worried about the beacon. If they used it, the black button would send up a flare on a scrambled channel to Mitchell, who could come extract them. It didn't deliver GPS information, and it didn't broadcast coordinates; it was only a burst of noise. But anyone paying attention would hear that noise and would know how to locate the signal and come for them too.

Shit. He should've killed his miserable, lousy, manipulative father.

How many times would he have that exact thought before he finally ignored Beckett and just did it?

Now that it looked like there was movement against Senator Bracken, that the Joint Task Force with Secret Service actually had solid evidence, then that meant a win for Kate - a win for justice. She was getting what she'd asked of him, what he'd promised that day in the park - he wouldn't assassinate Bracken, he wouldn't take the law into his own hands.

But Castle wasn't a police officer, and Black didn't abide by normal laws. Castle had done some of his best work in the assassination business, upsetting cruel foreign dictators, taking out the head of a drug cartel, rescuing American and British hostages in Ireland by sniper shooting the leader of an extreme faction of the IRA.

He swore he would do the job the next time they met. No matter what Kate said or worried about for the future of the regimen, they had what they needed to reverse engineer this thing. He was going to put a bullet in his father's brain.

Actually, if he could get close enough, he was going to break Black's neck. Be absolutely sure. Be able to feel his heart stop beating.

* * *

They'd walked for miles in the middle of the monsoon when she started to speed up; he couldn't understand how she could be going quite that fast. He felt like the ground beneath them was liquifying. The rain beat down so hard that the mud oozed with his every step and dragged at his feet. The forest floor was turning marshy, the usual roots and rocks seemed to give way to plant and animal decay.

The canopy over their heads blocked out most of the sunlight, but the rain slashed straight through the trees and kept them drenched even in this dense portion of the forest. Fungi seemed to grow out of nowhere, or maybe now that everything was so wet, Castle noticed their brilliant colors in stark relief against the dark bark of the trees. Neon colors that pulsed in his eyes.

And Kate went even faster.

Castle picked up his feet and slogged through it, squinted through the rain. It was hot and stuck to his skin, and his shoulder was beginning to beat in time to his own heart.

Oh.

Oh, the gunshot. Shot. That...

Not only did the fungi seem more vibrant, but the shrubs here were thicker, more woody and demanding. Their leaves were hardy, and the flowers were a thin, wispy yellow. Castle reached out with his uninjured arm and touched the asterid with a finger, narrowed his eyes as he recalled a faint memory from his father's damn flash cards.

"Kate," he called. "Hold on."

She stopped ahead of him and he studied the plant, tried to remember if it was leaf or root or flower that was most important.

"Castle." She came back to him and touched his wrist; he realized after a long moment that she was taking his pulse. "We really need to get to the extraction point before you..."

"Yeah, about that."

Panic crested across her face but he shook his head and reached for the leaves of the shrub with his hand.

"I'm okay. It's a clotting agent. Roots, leaves, flowers - I can't remember which - but natives used it for poison arrows."

"Poison arrows," she repeated.

"Make a paste, put it on my shoulder," he explained poorly. "I think..."

"Yeah, okay. I can do that."

"Don't ingest it," he warned. "Don't lick your fingers or..."

"Castle?"

"I think it's worse than I thought," he murmured. His back was on fire now, and the rain stung his neck. "Maybe you should look at it."

Her fingers curled tightly around his forearms and he was inordinately grateful for the sudden support.

"Turn around," she rasped.

At that moment the rain ceased entirely, a hush blanketing the forest floor, and the leaves dripped and groaned under the weight of water. Castle took a step and turned so she could see his back, his knees feeling like rubber.

"Oh God," she whispered.

"It's bad?"

"I - shit. Castle. How are you still standing?"

He felt his mouth working but his tongue was curiously dry.

"Okay, okay," she husked. "Baby, sit down."

"Not sure I'll get back up," he admitted.

"I need your shirt off so I can see. We'll use it to bind the wound. This is - oh, shit, Castle."

"Yeah, I got it," he muttered. His skin was hot and his fingertips felt strange; he wondered if it was through and through or if the bullet was getting lodged deeper in his shoulder. "Can you see if it the bullet exited?"

Her fingers were light along his back and then suddenly _sharp_ and he grunted, jerking in reflex.

"Looks like it passed through," she murmured. "You were right. It's a graze - technically, but it tore out a chunk of muscle right here."

"Feels it." He used his other hand to reach for the asterid plant, tried to remember its technical name. "Hispidus. Yeah. Put this on it. Stop the blood. Mash it up with a rock and soak up the juices with the bandage."

"Bandage will have to be your shirt," she muttered. "At least it's stopped raining. Can you take your shirt off or do I need to cut it?"

He experimented with a little movement, but it was okay; he'd be okay. Felt better sitting down. "I got it."

He pulled the material from his back and yanked it over his head, gritting his teeth at the burn across his skin. He held out the soaked garment to her and she wrung it out with a grim look on her face.

"Not going to die, Beckett."

"You better not," she muttered back at him. "Not after all this."

He smiled back at her, kept smiling until her dark concern gave way - a little bit - to some of that rueful love. He must have lost a lot of blood, if she was looking at him like that. "I'm really okay," he promised. "Just wrap the wound and we'll keep going."

When she came into him this time, it wasn't to inspect his shoulder but to give him a kiss, a soft one, a brush of her lips. He treasured it.

* * *

His shirt was soaked with blood. It made her nauseous, her hands coming away pink when she'd wrung rainwater out of the material. How could she have missed this?

He'd told her he was fine, she'd felt the heat of blood outside the perimeter walls, so how did she miss all this?

"Stop beating yourself up," he muttered.

She lifted her gaze to the back of his head as if she could see his expression, but she sighed and didn't answer. The leaves and flowers of the plant he'd picked out were pulpy, stringy things, making it difficult to create any kind of paste.

But she dutifully pressed it into the material she'd ripped from his shirt, folded it over to make a kind of compress. She laid it on top of his shoulder where the bullet had marked a gruesome trajectory, and he stumbled a little.

"You okay?"

"Okay," he echoed.

Beckett slowly wound the strips of t-shirt under his armpit and over his shoulder, making it secure. She hadn't pushed him about the wound because Castle was always more forthcoming about his injuries; he was the one who kept reminding her that holding it back only endangered the mission.

_If you were on my team, I'd bust you for putting us all at risk. Triage in the field, Beckett._

She pressed the bandage down against his shoulder and felt the answering flinch of his muscles; the blood soaked the top layer but the stupid plant paste seemed to actually be working. No more blood seeped out from under the t-shirt, and what was on his back was just the rain-pinked rivers from earlier.

"Seems to be working," she murmured.

She was trying not to feel guilty, feel responsibly for this one. But her stomach was churning with how damn _close_ they'd gotten, how it could have been so much worse.

"I'm usually the one hiding injuries," she said, knotting the strip of t-shirt she'd used. "Not you."

"I didn't notice it," he said, a little half shrug. The jungle was steaming after the rainfall, and she had to reach up and swipe the hair out of her eyes.

"How's it feel?"

"Better. Not quite so shaky."

Shaky. Shit. She circled around to see his face, but no longer was his skin cast in that pallor. He looked better, actually, and she hoped it was just sleeplessness and poor diet and blood loss and - oh, right - a bullet wound.

A bullet wound.

"Too close," she shook her head. "That was too close."

"But we got what we needed," he said, trying to smile at her. "I'm okay. Don't carry this too, Kate."

Carry it. She carried a lot, didn't she? She didn't know how to drop anything, didn't know where to put it if it wasn't on her shoulders.

Castle reached out with his good arm and wrapped it around her, drew her in against his wet chest. She huffed but laid her cheek to his skin, her palm over his heart.

"Not your responsibility, not your fault. My father started this - decades ago. Whatever decisions we have to make, whatever happens, we do the best we can. We've got the regimen; now we just need to get out of here. So lead the way."

She stepped back from him, saw the strength in his eyes. She didn't have words to answer him because there was still part of her that carried it, but at least she could keep going now. At least it didn't cripple her.

"And Kate? Maybe just a little slower this time."

* * *

She kept closer to him, slackened her pace until she was going so slowly that he was growling at her to stop babying him. The terrain was too rough to hold his hand like she really wanted - they'd never keep their balance - but she stuck to his side.

"Are you okay?" she said finally, her thumbs tucked under the straps of the pack to keep from reaching out to him again.

"I promise I'll tell you if I feel dizzy," he grumbled.

"No, I mean... your father."

He didn't answer that one, but she read it as a thinking silence and kept her mouth shut, waiting on him. They'd explored so much of this in therapy after Black had tried to kill her, but this time she'd gone running to the problem.

It had to be part of the reason why he'd ignored his own _bullet wound_ for goodness sake, in order to look at the scrape on her leg. His response was all out of proportion but since he'd just spent the whole jungle trek asking her to stop going it alone and really partner with him on this, she had let him look at her leg.

She'd given in to his emotional need rather than his physical, because she was inept at balancing the two. She understood the physical better; it was always plain to her what came next. She sucked at emotional.

But she was trying. She'd missed the bullet wound because she'd been worried about the emotional, and while her usual reaction would be to obsess over his physical state once more, she wasn't going to do that now.

She wasn't. She could learn - she could figure this out. She was an intelligent thirty-four year old woman who wanted to start a family with her husband; she could put some work into figuring out what was going on in his head and how she could help.

"Castle," she prompted. "I'm sorry your father turned out to be such a bastard."

He barked out a laugh. "Ah."

She hated it when he responded with _ah_, like he found her entire attempt at communication amusing. "Ah? That's all?"

"Sorry, I mean - yes. He really did turn out to be a bastard."

"I - that sounds harsh-"

"No, no. Beckett. That was perfect. A bastard and so much more."

She reached out and gripped his forearm, smoothing her thumb over his bones, needing connection. "I don't know how it happened - not with having him for a father, but Rick - you're such a good man."

He shot her a look both indulgent and pleased at the same time. He probably saw what she was doing - it wasn't hard to see - but he liked it anyway. She was so bad at speaking to his needs like this; she spoke better with touch. But she was going to put the words out there and see if it worked.

"You have honor and integrity in your work - you won't leave people behind. You're always open-minded to see the good in people-"

"That's you," he gruffed, shrugging his shoulders. "You're the one who did that."

"No, love. I couldn't _make_ you do anything you didn't think was right. You always had it in you, even if maybe it got suppressed. You were already a good man when I met you, struggling to make your stand. I just came along and stood with you."

Castle flipped his hand and curled his fingers up to touch hers; she took his hand for a tight squeeze despite the awkwardness of the movement as they walked.

And that seemed to do it. The key to unlocking him was - after all - just her touch. He started quietly, his voice so low she almost didn't hear the words.

"He has always put the program first," Castle said. "And I never cared until I met you. It was just how it was. And then you gave me life, showed me what passion and dedication and pride looked like. In comparison, Black's twisted versions of those things were shadow imitations. Hollow."

She couldn't help leaning closer, brushing her body along his, shoulders bumping to hear his words, to give him what he needed with her lack of space. She didn't have words to prompt him but he kept going anyway.

"And now, he doesn't matter. What he did to me, what he's done and is doing - none of that matters at all because I have you. Because you're here. I get to have all those things I never had and - and more. This life is... all because of you."

Kate turned her mouth to his bare shoulder, kissed his skin. He tasted faintly of iron and mud, the blood and the earth, but it was intoxicating because he was alive.

"If he - took you from me - if you died because of _him_, I don't know that I could... all of it would be gone, just like that. What would be the point of passion or pride or determination if you were... I just want a chance at keeping you alive. Give me a shot. I can do a lot of impossible things, Kate, love. I can do anything with you. Just give me the chance."

She swallowed the rough corners of the words he'd released and laid her cheek to his good shoulder, abandoning any attempt to keep up their pace. Maybe it was true that he needed to get to a hospital, but it was equally true that he needed to say these things to her and she needed to make him some promises in return.

"I can't tell you that I wouldn't want the regimen for you. I can't promise that I won't obsess over keeping you with me and alive and-" Kate choked off that line and cleared her throat. "But I can promise that I do it with you next time - every time. Even if it feels like I have no other options, I'll come to you first anyway."

"Together, right?" he rasped. "I just want us together."

"Of course," she said quickly. "From now on. Together. That's how we do this."

His grip on her hand loosened and only then did she realize how he'd been clinging for dear life, as if she might leave, as if it might be too late.

"I used to idolize him," Castle said. "At first. At the beginning. And then I merely feared and respected him. Somewhere along the way it turned into a rebellion against that attitude of superiority and self-righteousness, but you know what was always there? I loved him. I wanted him to love me."

She closed her eyes for a moment, the grief of a little boy heavy over her, but Castle kept going, his feet picking up and going a little faster as if he could outrun the truth.

"I wanted him to just... but that's dead. It's dead. What remains is hatred. I hate him. For what he's done to you, to me. But I'm afraid that might be worse. I'm afraid of what I'll do to him the next time."

* * *

The beacon worked without a hitch.

They stood in the trees with the clearing spread out before them, listening to the helicopter coming in low. It wasn't exactly silent, but it was fast, and Castle was hustling her out from under the canopy before the runners even touched the earth.

The last time she'd been running towards a helicopter, Castle had been bleeding out, near death, and she'd been shoving him onto a craft not made for cargo, praying he'd survive. With his father her only help.

This time she ran with her husband towards their transportation, the wind whipping around their faces and his hand around her arm to keep them together. Without the steam and sauna of the rainforest, her sweat and the rain were sticking to her, drying itchy on her skin.

Last time on the Russian steppe, she didn't know if Castle would survive, and she'd been left alone to face the wolves, telling herself over and over that with Black piloting him out of there, Castle would make it. And when Castle made it, he'd come back for her.

Now they couldn't be separated. Now they were leaving the Congo together, sweat-stained and ragged and bleeding, but alive. Alive. And the she had cases of serum carefully contained in the pack on her back - and with it a hope for their future.

When they got to the chopper, the pilot was Mitchell himself, giving them a relieved thumbs up and reaching over his head to flip a switch. Beckett crawled into the beast first, Castle's hand at her ass to give her a 'boost' she didn't need. She turned around on the open metal decking and shot him a look, but he was grinning.

Castle came in behind her and took her hand, slapped it over a metal handle, wrapped her fingers around it. "Hold on!" he shouted in her ear.

She nodded and saw Castle doing the same, and then he leaned forward and thumped twice on the back of Mitch's seat. The bird began to rise with a bump of its nose, the metal decking cold under her ass. The rainforest was waving in the whirl of air made by the helicopter, and she scanned the forest floor, searching for signs they'd been followed.

There was nothing.

Beckett pressed her body close to Castle's in the belly of the chopper, the bite of wind making her shiver. He turned to look at her, but whatever he said was lost in the roar of the rotor blades, snatched away by the wind.

Instead of trying to talk, she tightened her grip on the safety bar set into the side of the helicopter and reached out her free hand to his neck, tugged him into her. They kissed hard at first, a little desperate and maybe still angry, frustrated that it'd gone this way and hurt by the whole ordeal.

And then it burned away. His lips touched hers lightly, came back again for more of a give and take, the heat of him replacing the chill of their ride. She slipped her tongue along his, stroking, trying to soften.

It was an _I love you_ he didn't have to hear in her voice to feel.

It was one of the few perfect things she could give him.

* * *

Castle walked into the CIA station in Libreville under his own power. Shirtless, but he wasn't about to let them stretcher him into the basement infirmary. His shoulder burned but it wasn't anything he hadn't suffered before.

The station chief was grumbling under his breath about unauthorized movements in his territory, but Castle figured he was just blowing smoke. The guy had the whole island off the coast to contend with, and he wouldn't care about a couple of rogue agents scooped out of the Gabonese Congo.

Mitchell had stayed with the Chinook chopper on the roof's helipad - none of them trusted anyone and it was a loan from the Army Rangers anyway - but Castle had known it wasn't even something to bring up to Beckett. She wouldn't be staying behind on that chopper.

Beckett didn't make a sound; she followed him into the secure elevator and then down into the bowels of the station. She was carrying the backpack down at her side, her hand in a fist around the straps, definitely not willing to leave it behind either. Everything precious stayed together, right?

Castle was learning not only not to ask, but he was learning not even to think it. Hadn't occurred to him to leave her well-protected in the Chinook with Mitchell while he sank deeper into a CIA station that might have been taken over by Black's dark legion long ago. Maybe that was progress or maybe it was just stupidity.

Either way, her fingers skimming his waist as they stepped off the elevator were cool and lovely, made him both more alert and less surly. Station Chief Sanderson led them through a secure hallway guarded by two MPs and into a brightly-lit infirmary.

The CIA's on-call medic was already readying a tray with sutures and instruments, washing his hands over the sink. "Sit down," he said noncommittally.

Sanderson gave a half-salute that the doc grunted to, and then Sanderson left them alone in the infirmary. Beckett was nudging him towards the elevated dentist's chair, but Castle was glad to sit; he straddled it with a sigh and patted the plastic in front of him.

She shook her head, grabbed a rolling stool from the corner even as the medic took his own seat. No introductions, no greeting, the man simply pushed Castle to lean forward and started dabbing at the gunshot wound with iodine.

Kate took his free hand between her own and sat hunched over on the stool at his side, her smile sweet and deep. Filled with relief. She studied the medic's movements as he injected a local into Castle's shoulder, but Castle studied her.

She looked good actually. Healthy, strong, a little damp but he liked her wet. (Yeah, like that too.) Her hair had started to dry in tangled waves around her head, making her look like a college student fresh from a sorority rush rather than a CIA agent recalled home after a grueling mission.

Her fingers stroked his hand, down and round, along his digits, circling his knuckles, settling into the lifelines in his palm. Her gaze shifted from the medic's work to Castle's face and their eyes met in an electric and instant connection, her lips softening into a smile.

"Hey, there," she murmured. Her mouth widened, a gleam of teeth. "Just a scratch, Castle. No need for that."

He huffed a surprised laugh and nodded to the backpack she'd left at her feet. "So, it's done."

She glanced down as well, but neither of them named the thing they'd acquired. "It's done."

There were a hundred other things he wanted to say to her, but he wouldn't in front of an unknown medic. They'd take the serum and the stabilizers to Logan at Stone Farm, let him and Boyd and Threkeld have their way with the regimen, hopefully find out how to reproduce it. Even if that never happened, it was still enough to last him for a lifetime - if they were conservative.

She didn't have to worry about him. He wasn't going to be taken down by some damn flu again. But all he said was, "How's the leg?"

"Stings," she said, still smiling.

The medic glances up and leaned forward over Castle. "I'll get to you next."

"Of course," she murmured, but her indulgent smile was for Castle.

He wasn't angry with her any more; that had evaporated in the jungle. His trust was a little shaky, like a tower with a few key support pillars removed, but they were building it back. It could be repaired.

She gave a swift glance to the medic stitching his shoulder and then back to him once more, her eyes catching his and her smile beaming now. _I love you_, she mouthed at him.

He gave it back with a curl of his fingers around her hands, nudging his knee between her legs on the stool. She scooted forward and squeezed her knees around his thigh, smiling brilliantly now, illuminating the whole room.

She'd given him the words but he'd given her the actions, and maybe finally they had learned to speak each other's language.

* * *

So ends **Close Encounters 15: Never Say Never Again**

Stay Tuned for **Close Encounters 16: Skyfall**

* * *

Kate woke instantly with dreams of Africa. This time it had been baby hippos crying for their dead mother, though the night before it had been Castle trapped in the rubble, Beckett unable to shift the debris from him as he bled out around, unable to even get to the regimen case just out of reach, all of it for nothing.

But that wasn't real.

They had the regimen.

Just to reassure herself, Kate rolled over in bed and curled closer to her husband, listened to his heart beating steadily in his chest. He had a stupid grin on his face too, and it made her smile, but she lifted up on her elbow and checked his bedside table.

The bottle of pills were there, one-third empty after a couple weeks of taking them every day. It was part of their morning routine now, and he didn't even grumble at her for it. After she'd brought the serum to Boyd and Threkeld, the two doctors had been thrilled to have the 'complete set' as they'd called it.

Reverse engineering the regimen was number one on their priority list, but Castle was unwilling to continue taking the serum regularly. And since they didn't have enough for a lifetime of even periodic ingestion, she had agreed it wasn't feasible. But to keep his blood cells stable - super stable - they'd agreed on these pills.

They weren't the regimen, but they were an extremely low-dose mixture of serum compounded with elements of the stabilizers. Almost like an inoculation, as Threkeld had explained it to them. This way, Castle's lipoproteins would remain high enough for his body systems, as well as adding just enough _super_ to his diet so that he wouldn't fall into an immune response like before.

She was proud of him; he was being so patient with her on this. She was proud of herself too, for being able to compromise on it, to think it through logically. Castle had never taken the injections every day - only before and after a mission or when he'd been injured in the field, according to what he could remember - and the paperwork Castle had brought home with them from the Congo seemed to back him up on that.

So the schedule of injections and pills wasn't down to a science yet, but they'd agreed together on this program of recovery. They had even started up maintenance on their covert skills and self-defense techniques as a team. He'd asked her to promise to stay alive, but she only asked the same of him - and they were working together to keep those promises.

Kate leaned in and softly kissed those smiling lips, ran her fingers down his chest to caress his hip. When he still didn't wake, despite that good morning reaction to his dream, she slid out of bed and headed for the bathroom.

She felt really good for the first time in a long time. Black was still out there, a dark unknown, but even that was something of a relief. If they needed his specialty knowledge of the regimen and what it had done to Castle, then at least it was out there.

No, not just good. She felt _amazing._

Castle still loved her, had forgiven her, and nothing could break them.

* * *

Coming Soon to an alert near you...


End file.
